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Lenovo to acquire Motorola Mobility

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Re: Lenovo to acquire Motorola Mobility

#11

Post by pearjuice »

>Lenovo intends to keep Motorola’s distinct brand identity--just as they did when they acquired ThinkPad from IBM in 2005.

Are you fucking kidding me, Google? I don't know if you guys noticed but Lenovo completely ruined the ThinkPad brand into some average consumerist brand for their own good. They even went full-house when their Edge series lifted on the successful ThinkPad brand but was nothing more than that, a laptop with a name it couldn't live up to.

I fear the same to happen with Motorola Mobility. With the Moto G the entire smartphone market was completely disrupted because Google showed pathetic Android consumerist brands how good a low-budget phone can be; sometimes it performed even better than the more expensive "high-end" varieties. If the rumors are true and Google will also abandon the hand-tailored Nexus line-up in favor of bidding-wars for Google Play edition phones of the same consumerist brands, it's finally over.

When the Moto G was announced I had the same buzzy, warm, tingling feeling when Google started shipping the Nexus One. Now, I am realizing these will soon be vague memories to an era where smartphone users got value for their money.

Re: Lenovo to acquire Motorola Mobility

#12

Post by pavlov »

Next year, Microsoft will buy Lenovo for $22 billion.

It will nicely round out Microsoft's already expansive Xbox+Surface+Lumia hardware division with a full range of PCs and x86 servers.

Perhaps more pressingly, the deal will also ensure that the only growing PC maker stays in Microsoft's camp and abandons its flirtations with Android...

The last remains of Motorola Mobility will be dissolved into the MS division that was formerly Nokia Mobile Devices, completing a surreal cycle of acquisitions.

Re: Lenovo to acquire Motorola Mobility

#13

Post by lispsil »

Damnit, I used plenty of moto G's for android development they were great mainly because you could actually buy unlike Nexus constant shortages. Lenovo like most Chinese corps not friendly to open source I imagine they will replace fastboot with some crippled proprietary junk, and be unfriendly to kernel mods

Re: Lenovo to acquire Motorola Mobility

#14

Post by dudus »

This comment on the post summarizes well

>> Nicolas Charbonnier

  Moto total cost $12.5B to Goog in 2011:
  - $3.2B Moto's 2011 cash
  - $2.4B Moto's 2011 deferred tax assets
  - $2.35B Moto's Set-top-box business sold in 2012
  - $75M Moto's factories business sold in 2013 (incl 7K factory employees)
  - $2.91B Moto's Mobility business sold in 2014

  Thus Moto's remaining assets including patents, buildings
  (in Chicago and elsewhere), probably a good part of the 
  12K employees cost Goog $1.56B

  Doing that, Goog may have well protected and guided the
  Android ecosystem along in the past couple years.

Re: Lenovo to acquire Motorola Mobility

#15

Post by ChuckMcM »

Interesting, Google really really really doesn't want to be in the physical goods business, and yet they are buying robot companies. This is the first time I believe a large 'service' company is struggling with businesses in the "goods" side of the economy, we have seen many companies like IBM who started out all 'goods' and have been moving into all 'services'. Pretty good win for China as well.

Re: Lenovo to acquire Motorola Mobility

#16

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

UncleChis wrote: post #8

May be they need money for the Nest deal (just kidding). Very strange to think of the recent Nest acquisition and this sale! Someone opens my eyes please!

I was really hoping they'd be using the Nest acquisition to get some more hardware design talent on the Motorola team, but now I'm just baffled...

Re: Lenovo to acquire Motorola Mobility

#17

Post by buster »

pavlov wrote: post #12

Next year, Microsoft will buy Lenovo for $22 billion. It will nicely round out Microsoft's already expansive Xbox+Surface+Lumia hardware division with a full range of PCs and x86 servers. Perhaps more pressingly, the deal will also ensure that the only growing PC maker stays in Microsoft's camp and abandons its flirtations with Android... The last remains of Motorola Mobility will be dissolved into the MS division th…

I think you can be pretty sure that no company will buy Lenovo. Not only because it's big and expensive but because it's a chinese company. It's one of chinas gateways into the western market. The government won't let someone buy Lenovo, for sure. If someone buys a company it will be Lenovo, increasing its portfolio and pushing into US and european markets.

Re: Lenovo to acquire Motorola Mobility

#19

Post by chris_mahan »

pearjuice wrote: post #11

>Lenovo intends to keep Motorola’s distinct brand identity--just as they did when they acquired ThinkPad from IBM in 2005. Are you fucking kidding me, Google? I don't know if you guys noticed but Lenovo completely ruined the ThinkPad brand into some average consumerist brand for their own good. They even went full-house when their Edge series lifted on the successful ThinkPad brand but was nothing more than that, a l…

They divested a business they couldn't profit from. I say good for them.

What Lenovo does going forward is not entirely clear.

On Google not selling devices anymore: the Chinese manufacturers have won, and they will flood the US market with great, inexpensive devices. They are going after the great unwashed masses who want smart phones, all over the world. Billions of them. Only they can supply the phones, so Google wisely exits the race, and will stick to what it knows best: software.

Re: Lenovo to acquire Motorola Mobility

#20

Post by bliti »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

Interesting, Google really really really doesn't want to be in the physical goods business, and yet they are buying robot companies. This is the first time I believe a large 'service' company is struggling with businesses in the "goods" side of the economy, we have seen many companies like IBM who started out all 'goods' and have been moving into all 'services'. Pretty good win for China as well.

Robotics is currently more about software (CV, ML, etc) than hardware. Mechanical engineers can really build one hell of a robot, electrical engineers can wire it beautifully, computer engineers can create an awesome processor for it, but software engineers are still catching up. That is where Google seems to be taking interest. Once machines are able to "see" and recognize the outside world then learning about it is simply more of a time constraint than anything.
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