Google's decision to sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.91 billion is even more surprising than Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in 2011.
"Lenovo will now acquire world-renowned Motorola Mobility, including the MOTOROLA brand and Motorola Mobility's portfolio of innovative smartphones like the Moto X and Moto G and the DROID™ Ultra series. In addition to current products, Lenovo will take ownership of the future Motorola Mobility product roadmap. Google will maintain ownership of the vast majority of the Motorola Mobility patent portfolio, including current patent applications and invention disclosures."
Motorola's patents weren't that valuable, Google didn't manage to make Motorola profitable, it started to compete with the other Android OEMs and sold Motorola at a loss. Still, why not try harder to make Motorola shine once again? Why admit defeat and show that your strategy was wrong?
I think the answer can be found in Google's licensing agreement with Samsung:
"Samsung Electronics and Google Inc. furthered their long-term cooperative partnership with a global patent cross-license agreement covering a broad range of technologies and business areas. The mutually beneficial agreement covers the two companies existing patents as well as those filed over the next 10 years."
Samsung is the biggest Android OEM and a switch from Android to Tizen would be a very bad news for Google. If Samsung used its dominant position and asked Google to get rid of Motorola, Google didn't have other options.
Motorola is a lost bet, Google showed that the health of the Android ecosystem is more important than owning Motorola.
{ Thanks, Jérôme. }
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