Wonderful analysis of Motorloa-Goggle deal

★ Balls
[Via Daring Fireball]

I’m fascinated by Dan Lyons’s take on Google acquisition of Motorola today, “Suck on It, AppleSoft — Google Pulls a Rope-a-Dope”:

Everyone was baffled when Google made those crazy bids for the Nortel patents last month. Remember? They bid things like the distance from the earth to the sun, the number pi, and some other wacky numbers from mathematics. Which led ultra Apple fanboy MG Siegler to crow that Google had got “pi in the face” and was “living in a dream world” and “look like huge asses in retrospect.”

Lyons has always been an ass, but when did he get so bitter? Siegler is one of the top writers on the Apple beat, period. Good sources, smart analysis, and he’s been right way way way more often than he’s been wrong. Calling him an “ultra fanboy” isn’t going to convince anyone who’s actually keeping score that Siegler is an irrational zealot, but it does make Lyons sound like there’s spittle frothing out of his own mouth. More than a little bit of projection, methinks.

And today it all makes sense. Google just sandbagged its rivals. The whole thing was a rope-a-dope maneuver. Google never cared about the Nortel patents. It just wanted to drive up the price so that AppleSoft (those happy new bedmates) would overpay. Today, with the Motorola deal, Google picks up nearly three times as many patents as AppleSoft got from Novell and Nortel.

And they paid… nearly three times as much.

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Read the whole article. The case is madethat Google was in a eak place and that Motorola got a lot more for itselfthan expected – 60% premium for everything raher than just licensing or litigation rights for the patents puls $2.5 billion if the deal does not go through.

This does not seem like a company operating from a position of strength. At least if the patents is all they wanted.

Motoroloa Mobility makes hardware, including TV set top boxes. Perhaps Google will recoup some of its investment here. If Google had ever really shown otself capable of managing a hardware company, especially one with almost as many employees as already work for Google.

Perhaps they know something we don’t. It’ll be intersesting.

The bio of Jobs will make a ton of money

This Is The Cover Of The Official Steve Jobs Biography, To Be Released On 11/21/11
[Via Cult of Mac]

Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ official biography by Walter Isaacson has just had its release date bumped to November 21st, 2011 from the original date of March 6th, 2012. It also has a new cover and a new title!

The new title is Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, and the cover is as austere and attractive as an iPod advertisement. The bio is 448 pages long and is based on over 40 interviews with Steve Jobs, in addition to talks with his family and friends.

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It’ll make a lot mainly because it is prices at $32.50! Quite a bit for the Christmas season.

More lawsuits against Android?

FOSS Patents: Most Android vendors lost their Linux distribution rights, could face shakedown or shutdown
[Via FOSS Patents]

Last week I read about an Android licensing issue that I wasn’t previously aware of. It’s a pretty serious one, and it’s not that hard to understand. The short version is that

• rampant non-compliance with the source code disclosure requirement of the GPLv2 (the license under which Linux is published) — especially but not only in connection with Honeycomb — has technically resulted in a loss of most vendors’ right to distribute Linux;
• this loss of the distribution license is irremediable except through a new license from each and every contributor to the Linux kernel, without which Android can’t run; and
• as a result, there are thousands of people out there who could legally shake down Android device makers, threatening to obtain Apple-style injunctions unless their demands for a new license grant are met.

[More]

Android might have some licensing problems that could result in a multitude of lawsuits from developers. This is something that a handful of patents might not fix.

Using an Open Source license was one of the things that Google did  right. But it does appear that  parts of the current versions of Andoid found on handsets/tablets might violate that license.

Due to the nature of the license, the only way forward is to either completely redevelope parts of the OS – a possibly time-consuming effort – or to repurchase a licese from the developers – a possibly expensive effort.

This will be interesting to see how it plays out.