Horace Dediu on Google’s acquisition of Motorola<\/a>, and the unintended consequences that will come from what is now a classic channel conflict.<\/p>\n

In short, when the supplier of a license is also a competitor of others who use that license, then the other competitors get uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

HTC, Samsung, LG, Sony, and Motorlola all license Android for use in their handsets. Now, part of the competition (Motorola) is owned by the company that everyone licenses from (Google).<\/p>\n

Fortunately for HTC, Samsung, LG, and Sony, Google promises that “Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open”, and that they “will run Motorola as a separate business.”<\/p>\n

For one, I don’t think too many people believe that Google will leave Motorola as a separate business and solely use its patents as a defense against Microsoft and Apple. And secondly, if Google were to leave Motorola as a separate business then it would be a massively missed opportunity for Google.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Horace Dediu on Google’s acquisition of Motorola, and the unintended consequences that will come from what is now a classic channel conflict. In short, when the supplier of a license is also a competitor of others who use that license, then the other competitors get uncomfortable. HTC, Samsung, LG, Sony, and Motorlola all license Android […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shawnblanc.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6199"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shawnblanc.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shawnblanc.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shawnblanc.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shawnblanc.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6199"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/shawnblanc.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20941,"href":"https:\/\/shawnblanc.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6199\/revisions\/20941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shawnblanc.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shawnblanc.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shawnblanc.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}