Has Google wasted $12bn on a dud patent poker-chip?

Now that Google has sunk $12.5B into the patent system, I fear the fight against software patents has lost it's most powerful ally.

I think it's more the case that Google has to fight both sides of this: acquire patents for defense in the short term, lobby congress for patent reform in the long term.

I think long long-term, the friction of the patent system goes against Google's incentives. Google isn't a hardware company (even though they just bought one). They sell search ads, and their complements are hardware, software, everything between consumers and search ads. If patents in general are a tax on innovation, that's bad for Google.

"Google didn't take IP seriously, bidding silly numbers (such as pi billion dollars) for the Nortel patents."

Why does everyone keep rehashing this statement that was asinine the first time? How do the specific digits of their bids say anything about Google's stance towards IP? Pi billion is over 141 million more serious of a bid than the 3 billion that I guess would have made everyone more comfortable.

I fear the essence of this story is true, that Google doesn't have a coherent strategy with regard to this fight, and its certainly out of their comfort zone, so this does feel more like someone flailing.

That being said, Google has a really deep pool of expertise in a lot of areas in house and if they can come up with a reasonable way to surface that expertise I would expect them to come up with a solid response.

“Google was bidding with numbers that were not even numbers,” one of the sources said. “It became clear that they were bidding with the distance between the earth and the sun. One was the sum of a famous mathematical constant, and then when it got to $3 billion, they bid pi,” the source said, adding the bid was $3.14159 billion. “Either they were supremely confident or they were bored.”

Google thought they were playing a game, lost, and has been crying about it ever since.