I guess that Nokia being Microsoft's bitch made them a bit nervous. Before anyone says that this is related to Motorola's patents, they're unlikely to help much. More at the link.
It has come out that Google did not give due diligence to the patent suite owned by Motorola. To me, this seems a bit knee-jerkish given the fact that they had the chance to buy a far superior patent suite from the Nortel bankruptcy for far less.
Samsung is too big for Google to buy? As someone who owns and uses a Samsung phone and as someone who has owned and used an assortment of Motorola devices, in my opinion Motorola builds a superior device. Samsung phones are nice but they do have their problems. Samsung is also not very proactive in dealing with bugs in their phones, or getting updates out in a reasonable, timely manner.
Yes, quite too big, actually. Samsung has 300 billion in total assets and over 100 billion in total equity. Google only has about 50 billion in total assets and about 45 billion in total equity. Google couldn't come up with enough money to buy Samsung if they actually sold off every corporate asset that they had.
You hit it, but I'll expound. Google is more profitable than Samsung and has greater return on receipts, but Samsung, as a manufacturer, has more physical assets.
Google has a greater return on receipts because they don't actually make anything, and therefore have very low overhead. Samsung's yearly profits are easily double or more that of Google's.
Motorola was also about to file suit against the other Android handset makers, and Google has killed that.
It was definitely about the patents. They paid exactly as much (down to the cent) per patent from Motorola (assuming the whole price went into IP) as they did from Novell. They love doing shit like that, and they wouldn't have done it if it wasn't about the patents. https://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/08/valuing-patents
Listened to podcast on NPR about the extremely vague wording of IT patents, Non Practicing Entities, and the high costs to the economy and loss of innovation due to them. Pretty fucked up shit.
The initial declarations are vague. The meat of the documents can be quite pacific, but it is still not programming what has been patented. It is lame. I think, for ecample, that AtAri patented games in which a ball is paddled back and forth between two players.
