Google, which bought Motorola Mobility in 2011 for $12.5 billion, announced last week it is selling the smartphone maker to PC manufacturer Lenovo for $2.9 billion. Bad deal? Perhaps not, experts are saying: Think patents, not hardware.
Google is not a hardware company, so why did they pay so much for Motorola? Because what they wanted was not to get into the smartphone manufacturing business so much as they wanted to grab Motorola’s vault of patents.
Google lost out in a 2011 bidding war for the patent trove of Nortel Networks, a bankrupt telecom equipment maker in Canada, which saw 6,000 patents bought by a consortium that included Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Ericsson and Sony for $4.5 billion.
That patent haul would protect the consortium from intellectual property infringement suits, but…