We have had a few days now to digest the acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google. It is clear that the stock market does not like the deal – the price of a share of GOOG has dropped by $30 since the deal was announced. A respected analyst, Horace Dediu, has written a long article in the Harvard Business Review and talked more about it in the “critical path podcast” – both of which are summarized very well in Fortune’s Apple 2.0 blog by Philip Elmer-DeWitt.
I encourage all to read the pieces linked above and to listen to the podcast, but I’ll also cut to the chase. Dediu’s conclusion is that Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility makes no sense. Not as an expansion of Google’s business, not as a strategic decision to begin making telephone handsets and tablets, not even as an expensive way to buy lots of patents that deal with various aspects of mobile computing and communications.
One thing that we do know is that Google does not employ dumb people. They must have something in mind to support their decision to spend $12.5 billion – a lot of money even if you have Google’s bank account.
