31–40 of 40 posts
While the register portrays Google's moves as blundering, Dan Lyon's take is the exact opposite. I suspect it may be a while before we know which is true, although I want to lean towards Dan's view: http://realdanlyons.com/blog/2011/08/15/suck-on-it-applesoft...
I've never once read a register article and felt enlightened -- I've mentally compartmentalized them as a place to ignore. Did I get the wrong impression, and they can in fact be a useful source of new & commentary?
While the register portrays Google's moves as blundering, Dan Lyon's take is the exact opposite. I suspect it may be a while before we know which is true, although I want to lean towards Dan's view: http://realdanlyons.com/blog/2011/08/15/suck-on-it-applesoft...
I've never once read a register article and felt enlightened -- I've mentally compartmentalized them as a place to ignore. Did I get the wrong impression, and they can in fact be a useful source of new & commentary?
I enjoy their style, and reflect carefully on the above paragraph whenever I read one of their more controversial articles. However, I don't think you're missing much by skipping them.
While the register portrays Google's moves as blundering, Dan Lyon's take is the exact opposite. I suspect it may be a while before we know which is true, although I want to lean towards Dan's view: http://realdanlyons.com/blog/2011/08/15/suck-on-it-applesoft...
For Nortel there were at least 5 other consortium members -- MS, Sony, and EMC paid a total of $800M (not sure of the exact split). Apple paid $2.6B.
My point is that by doing a consortium approach they actually spent relatively little money on it, and they all cross-license. Google, OTOH, is paying the full $12.5B for Motorola.
While the register portrays Google's moves as blundering, Dan Lyon's take is the exact opposite. I suspect it may be a while before we know which is true, although I want to lean towards Dan's view: http://realdanlyons.com/blog/2011/08/15/suck-on-it-applesoft...
I think Dan's probably wrong on this. First, in the Novell deal MS ended up getting most of their money back, they basically just licensed the patents (part of the DoJ deal). For Nortel there were at least 5 other consortium members -- MS, Sony, and EMC paid a total of $800M (not sure of the exact split). Apple paid $2.6B. My point is that by doing a consortium approach they actually spent relatively little money on…
I suspect Dan is closer to right than wrong - particularly on the FTC angle.
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.
Their decisions regarding Android appear to have been made based on a corporate culture oriented toward trade secrets over patents, and their assumptions regarding IP appear to have been biased by that corporate culture - i.e. there's some viability to a clean room approach to copyright and trade secrets, there is not one for patents.
Google's "damn the torpedoes approach" got them into the marketplace quickly, but the mines are all still in the water and so is their fleet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Dan's probably wrong on this. First, in the Novell deal MS ended up getting most of their money back, they basically just licensed the patents (part of the DoJ deal). For Nortel there were at least 5 other consortium members -- MS, Sony, and EMC paid a total of $800M (not sure of the exact split). Apple paid $2.6B. My point is that by doing a consortium approach they actually spent relatively little money on…
Looking at MMI's balance sheet, they have $3B in cash. So Google is really paying $9.5B. And, IMO, they are getting so much more for that money than they would have received with a pure IP-only play like Nortel. I suspect Dan is closer to right than wrong - particularly on the FTC angle.
In addition to the points I made earlier, Google driving up the price of patents works against them too. It's not as if Motorola doesn't seem what the going rate of Nortel and Interdigital patents are. In fact just last week Motorola said they were open to doing WP phones. That was purely a way to get the last dollar on the selling price.
My point is that Google didn't get AppleSoft to pay all that much since they did it consortium style. And the price Google paid for Motorola was probably higher than it needed to be if Motorola didn't value their patents with respect to prices they saw in the Nortel deal (and they're not stupid enough to have missed it).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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 playi…
“Google was bidding with numbers that were not even numbers,” one of the sources said. "We bid the sum of --" pinky to corner of mouth "-- NaN billion dollars."
"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.
In hindsight, it's easy to imagine the Google executives bidding fancy numbers while rubbing their hands in glee saying "Haha, lets drive up the costs for Apple/MS and waste their cash while we're anyway going to complain to the DoJ like we did with the Novell patents and the deal to buy Motorola is almost closed. Haha. What next, Planck's constant or the Avogadro number?". Not that it actually happened, but certainl…
While the register portrays Google's moves as blundering, Dan Lyon's take is the exact opposite. I suspect it may be a while before we know which is true, although I want to lean towards Dan's view: http://realdanlyons.com/blog/2011/08/15/suck-on-it-applesoft...
http://gigaom.com/2011/08/15/guess-who-else-wanted-to-buy-mo...