You may know of Googles latest purchase, just a small buyout of a little startup, yeah right- MOTOROLA (mobility) have been purchased by the internet add and search giant for what must be about the same money as Murdoch bid to buy B-SKY-B ! so how much exactly is that ? ehhr about 10 billion or over ! its good to be bloody loaded you know!
Screams of joy as we sit back and imagine great new devices running Android built by the now Google branded Motorola team…… STOP ! … Thats not why Google set out to buy the mobile and comms devision of Motorola – its all about the patents they now own, all 24,000 of them!
So is this buy worth the cash Google spent ? well to be honest i dont think Google had much choice since they totally lucked out in the past due to the lack of patents they owned and since patent wars have become the new business battle field in recent times its absolutely required for Google to posses a catalogue of such intellectual rights to fight their corner, or side , or half, or however many bits they now own of their industry!
Motorola have not done too well in recent years, they are not the same company as they were back in their glory days, between 2007 – 2009 they lost about 4.5 billion and by this year they had split the company in two to create Motorola Solutions ( the best bit of the company that began in 1928 ) and the other half Motorola Mobility, ( the bit that made the razor and the xoom! ) Google aquired the Mobility bit !!
So back to these pesky patents, we all know how it works, Apple draw a kiddy like picture of a phone with a human hand a jet pack and a parachute and claim they invented the mobile phone emergency survival kit! then once the technology becomes available to build such a device they tax the hell out of anyone who tries something remotely similar, lets say a mobile phone with a built in hand dryer ! yep thats the world we now live in!
Google face many legal battles with Android just because of its ridiculous growth and other big corps like Apple cant just sit back and watch Google trash their patch – other battles come from Oracle who claim Android owes licence revenue due to implementation of Java code, lets see how that one pans out next year.
In other similar battles Apple (again) are attempting to sue Samsung because they claim the new Galaxy Tab looks like the iPad, in the picture below you could say it does untill you realise that picture has been photoshop edited by apple to look just like the iPad, thats dirty !
Now isnt that amazing? they look the same size! in reality the Galkaxy tab is both longer and much narrower than Apples iPad – it has to be by design due to the fact it has a completely different aspect ratio, and for Apples benefit here ill explain Aspect Ratio – its the relationship between the vertical and horizontal dimension of an object if an object is of a different aspect ratio it has to be different in length and width!
Also theres the lovely way in which apple have shown the galaxy tab with its app draw open, the app drawer is just a folder full of apps and does not reflect the true appearance of the tablet, unlike Apple who only have enough imagination to put shortcuts to apps on their desktop the galaxy tab has an array of widgets and this maked it look nothing like the ipad.. look..
It looks like the patent wars are just a fact of life now so we must all just sit back and watch the money we spend on our gadgets being wasted as companies attack each other with their cash, not good to know your money is being spent on this is it? – One last point, do you ever see Samsung trying to sue Sony because they have just released a 42 inch 16:9 screened TV? No because that would be ridiculous ..
