Now we know that Google’s purchase of Motorola was a “gargantuan mistake,” said Verne Kopytoff in Time.com. Just three years after shelling out $12.5 billion for the phone-maker, Google last week announced its sale to electronics company Lenovo Group for $2.9 billion. “Google’s exit after just 22 months isn’t exactly surprising.” The decision to acquire Motorola, a complex manufacturing operation with chronically slim margins, “never seemed convincing.” Offloading it is a smart move, since investing more in its operations would be “risky and tangential to Google’s more important Android software business.” Sure, this divestiture comes at a high price, but “making big bets on risky projects” is part of Google’s culture. “Usually, the failures are relatively small and disappear quietly, never to be seen again.” This “misstep was big and unavoidably public,” but Google can afford to take the hit.
Whatever it may look like, Google’s dalliance with Motorola was no failure, said Leonid Bershidsky in Bloomberg.com. “The reason can be found in the part of the company that Google has retained—a portfolio of thousands of patents.” That intellectual property may prove useful down the road, helping Google develop new products, ward off lawsuits from rivals, and drum up licensing fees. Motorola’s more than 17,000 patents have also helped the company take advantage of offshore tax schemes that whittle down its tax bill. Google made only a “halfhearted try” at making handsets. But “it takes the patent cache more seriously. That part of the Motorola deal might not have outlived its usefulness yet.”
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