Buying out of trouble: Google to purchase Motorola Mobility

Google has, in the past, only bought smaller companies like Android and Admob. After seeing its effort to purchase Nortel Networks portfolio of patents foiled by Google’s competitors, Google announced its biggest scalp till date, its purchase of Motorola Mobility.

The fact that Motorola was not sued despite the recent onslaught of lawsuits among technology companies speaks volumes of Motorola’s strong fortress of patents. Motorola has been a strong supporter of Android OS and the purchase enables Google a foothold to a hardware platform. However, a large majority of the US$12.5 billion that Google paid for Motorola Mobility is purely to defend itself from lawsuits. In fact, once the purchase is completed, Google will have a large arsenal of patents to go after companies who have been attacking both Google and other manufacturers running on the Android platform. The hunted (Google) will become the hunter…