I'm sorry, was it really necessary to remove the "Mobility" part of the original post for the title? This isn't an acquisition of the whole Motorola company...
One thing I find interesting is that nowhere in the post itself does Larry Page (or whatever flack wrote this for him) say "Motorola Mobility". The only place that construction appears is in the title of the blog post.
Actually, this was the reason the title is what it is. I didn't intend to mislead, I just didn't read the title and made one up from the article (clearly I did read it, but not consciously).
Who needs innovation anymore when you can just copy your competition feature-for-feature, subsidize with ad revenue, give it away for free, and acquire patent protection?
It seems to me like you want to suggest, that Google is copying Apple here. (If not, ignore this post.)
I remember using a Nokia smartphone back in 2004. It already had the application icon grid, colored icons, it had maps, it had navigation, a web browser, email and an mp3 player. The quality of the software was poor, the hardware was cheap and underpowered, there was no multi-touch and, of course, the network was slow and too expensive to actually use.
Sure, Apple took the smartphone and actually turned it into a mobile computer that was a pleasure to use. Also the timing was right.
Google did not add as much value as Apple to the state of the art. But Apple certainly copied older smartphones feature-for-feature as well, then they made this into a great experience.
But to suggest that now Apple has somehow the exclusive right to produce phones that are not on the level of smartphone from 2006 and older is just wrong.
It is not as though Apple's innovation has been unrewarded. At some point the value of the innovation is less that the value of some other things, like price competition.
One thing that beats me is how are they going to assert their position about openeness when talking to partners like HTC and Samsung? What credibility does google have when in past they have already tried to restrict access to newer android builds from partners who do not integrate with their apps.
As a partner, I'd be very weary of dealing with them. Google has a huge job of winning those guys back.
What they have to realize is that Android did not really win on being "android" it won because it was a "cheaper iphone" made by a lot of hardware partners. That filled the gap while iphone was content being exclusive. Now iPhone available with both major vendor and most other countries, its going to be a tough road.
