Mark

This week has started with a bang: Google is acquiring Motorola Mobility for much more than a sarcastic math constant. Larry Page says this is largely a defensive move to acquire Motorola’s patent portfolio, so I presume David Drummond’s team did the appropriate diligence to confirm the patents are not “bogus”.

Macworld’s Dan Moren makes a good, sad point: we are in the middle of a cynical IP arms race that doesn’t appear to be slowing down. Over at The New Yorker, Nicholas Thompson laments the depressing irony of this move: just twelve days after fairly lamenting patent warfare as stifling, Google has forcefully decided a once-free company’s direction.

The patent harassment lawsuits between Apple, Microsoft, Google, and the Android OEMs won’t stop, but Google is at least less likely to lose now. It’ll likely end as it always does: with cross-licensing cease-fires, which may or may not trickle down to Google’s partners. Nilay Patel has a quick summary of the short-term legal fallout. He concludes:

 …it’s still curious why Google spent the full $12.5b on Motorola, instead of a smaller amount acquiring the rights to Moto’s patents — or the rights to litigate with those patents.

I think that’s pretty simple: Motorola is already a leading Android OEM and has little to gain from a mere licensing deal. It could certainly use the cash — the last three fiscal years have ended with net losses — but I think the executive team saw an opportunity to really alter the company’s future and played hardball. In that light, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha’s recent public comments become much more interesting. In a two-day span last week, Jha said that he was interested in building Windows Phone 7 hardware, and that they may start flexing their IP against fellow Android OEMs. It’s now obvious that these were warning shots to Google during negotiations. Given the ludicrous price Google paid, I’d say it worked.

I think there’s more, though. Florian Mueller tweets:

Google’s original strategy for Android resulted in huge and fast-growing activation numbers. But something must have been missing.

A lot is missing, not the least of which is a stable platform. OS and app fragmentation will only get worse as more Android devices pop up. Google can solve this problem in a few ways, assuming the MMI acquisition goes through:

1. Choke the OEMs out of business with unified, best-of-breed Motorola devices.
2. Make it easier for Android developers to write multi-device native apps.
3. Make the browser a true first-class unifying platform on Android.

OEMs should definitely be afraid of option 1, but ad sales are still Google’s core business. Eyeballs are all that matter there, so momentum through a diverse flood of devices will continue to be Android’s goal for some time. But there’s little doubt that Motorola will be the preferred Android OEM moving forward, just as there’s little doubt that Nokia will be the preferred Windows Phone 7 OEM.

I don’t believe Google will solve the fragmentation problem at the native level; it’s just not in their self-styled DNA to apply the necessary focus or constraints, especially while growth is a priority. But I am willing to believe Google will try to solve the fragmentation problem with a rich web framework. And this is the point where we recall that Motorola acquired 280 North almost exactly one year ago.

280 North makes a framework called Cappuccino that allows you to write rich web applications using Objective-C syntax. (Objective-C is the language used to write native Mac and iOS applications.) The technology has produced some beautiful work, and could help Google woo iOS developers to Android with much less pain than they’re accustomed to.  We haven’t heard a whole lot since Motorola bought them, but I have to believe Google is interested in this technology. It’s produced some compelling work, I don’t believe it was a factor in the acquisition deal, but I do think Cappuccino has a future at Google.

Motorola has had problems for years, and Google is not a hardware company. Time will tell whether this marriage will actually work. For the time being, the winners are Motorola’s shareholders, and its executive team, who pulled off a hell of a deal.

(UPDATE: Florian Mueller has observed an unusually large $2.5B “breakup” fee for Motorola if the deal falls through. It really looks like Motorola got its way here.)

Google SVP and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond threw a public tantrum Wednesday over the recent patent auctions Google lost to Microsoft, Apple, and a number of other companies. This led to a heated exchange between Microsoft and Google over Twitter and the web. MG Siegler at TechCrunch has a nice recap if you’ve missed any of it.

More than enough holes have already been poked in Drummond’s logic. What’s truly astounding is that this was not a leaked memo or an investigative hit piece: it was a deliberate PR stunt that completely backfired. It is a textbook example of why you don’t open your mouth before you’re ready to talk. This was a chance to set the record straight and turn the tables in this debate, and Google blew it. Most of the mistakes made were simple, avoidable failures of communication.

The first failure was lack of clarity: specifically, letting the Chief Legal Officer write nearly 500 words of unstructured whining. How many ordinary people understand lawyers, let alone sympathize with them? A piece of communication this important should have been painstakingly reviewed: its prose; its tone; its presentation; its source; and my goodness, its facts. It’s quite clear that nobody examined the post with a level head.

The second failure was lack of disclosure. Microsoft’s General Counsel and Head of Communications immediately countered Google’s accusations with a conveniently missing piece of information:

Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no.

This revelation forced Drummond to update his post with another two hundred frustrated words. In less than a day (and 140 characters), Google wound up against the same wall it tried to pin the opposition to. If Drummond had mentioned this little fact up front and quickly dismissed it, he’d have remained in the driver’s seat. Now he looks disorganized, disheartened, and dishonest.

The third failure was lack of awareness. Drummond attempted to rally the troops without so much as mentioning a very real, very relevant dilemma: the patent troll organization known as Lodsys, which has sued a growing number of Android (and iOS) app developers. The Droid Army is under siege, their livelihoods threatened, and the generals have finally stood up to… ask the troops to feel sorry for the generals. I’m sure they feel great today.

Nobody was waiting for Google to say something; Google stood up and demanded we all listen. If you walk up to the microphone like that, you need to have your story straight. It would not have been hard to spend a little more time preparing an impassioned and credible statement that appealed to the reader.

The sad thing about all of this is that the patent system in our industry is in fact horribly, cynically broken. Google had a terrific opportunity to make that case and shift public opinion in its (and I believe in the long term, everyone’s) favor. Instead, it cried like a rich kid who lost an auction.

Bad communication is bad business. I’ll call LG on it, I’ll call Apple on it, and I’ll call Google on it.

Nearly a year ago I listed the major competitors in this decade’s mobile platform war. At that time, I couldn’t help but notice something:

RIM looks pretty bad here. They have little cash and no diversity, by comparison.

Ten months later, the cash and outlook aren’t much better, and we’re waiting for diversity in the form of the PlayBook: a tablet that runs BlackBerry Tablet OS, Adobe AIR, Flash, Android apps, and anything else that might possibly hopefully oh please be on the list of what you’re wanting in a tablet.

The rumored Android app support was officially confirmed this week. In true backward-looking enterprise fashion, it’s limited to the all-but-obsolete Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” runtime. (Android 3.0, “Honeycomb,” is the first Android version that Google considers tablet-worthy.)

If you’re wondering what this all means, let co-CEO (seriously) Jim Balsillie clear it up for you. The whole thing is an uncompromising miracle of confused CIO claptrap. If you own, or plan to own RIM stock, you must read it in its entirety.

You could argue that RIM is playing to its classic audience: business decision makers who just need a checklist covered and don’t care about much else. The problem is the genuinely good products out there now are already chipping away at the same list. “We have all that” is no longer enough. And no matter who your target audience is, clarity of message is important — only more so when you’re late to the game. John Gruber asks:

Which one of these is the native SDK for the PlayBook. Which one’s best? What is RIM’s advice for how developers should write PlayBook apps?

RIM has two CEOs and three COOs. Why is anyone expecting straight answers from a company that can’t even decide who’s in charge?

Here are some big takeaways for your next slide deck. RIM has:

• Very little cash
• Weak Q1 guidance
• No clear management structure
• No clear product strategy

If that’s not a win-win synergy of agile infrastructure assets, well you need to start pivoting.