http://liliputing.com/2014/01/reports-lenovo-buy-motorola-google-3-billion.html



Google got clever a while back and bought Motorola for $13 billion dollars.  It was a quick, almost compulsive purchase.

The Orientals went nuts at the news and immediately moved to replace Android with several home cooked alternatives (various forks of Android).

Samsung and Intel pushed forward with Tisen.

Mozilla Foundation pushed forward with Fireflox.

Google soon realized that buying Motorola was a BIG mistake and they then separated out all the patents and all the techie historical development items and a few of the hardware projects that they had pushed over to Motorola for them to handle, and then Google sold the rest of the hardware part of Motorola (and the name) to Lenovo.   For 2.91 billion dollars.  

This was a 10 billion dollar loss to Google.

To finish correcting the oriental perception that Google was planning to do a Microsoft on them, Google offered cross-licensing for 10 years to the larger Oriental players.

In other words "See, I am not in the hardware business and I put most all of my software out as FOSS, and if you want we can share all our cards for the next 10 years and Google can cover you with all these neat & nifty Motorola patents that we can use to counter-sue whomever should they attack "us" with a troll suit.   Samsung said yes to this deal.

Google plans to "do no evil" and by and large they really seem to attempt to do just that.   They screwed up big time buying Motorola, now they are making amends.

At over 80% of the world-wide phone OS market, and swinging the worlds most popular browser Google must be raking in the advertisement $$$ right now and they certainly can afford to make amends.

Being a Microsoft style hardware maker (direct competitor) really hasn't worked out for anybody but Apple and you can argue that since Apple doesn't offer their software to anyone so really it doesn't work for Apple either.  

Microsoft is $900,000,000 in the hole with a warehouse full of slightly obsolete Surface RT tablets that they are trying to move at under $169 per unit on Ebay right now.   Microsoft still hasn't learned though (and Ballmer is still running the show over there).

The emphasis is third world countries for the next year or so as computing and INTERNET world wide has moved from PC to tablet and now firmly over to the phone as the most pervasive method to get on line and to communicate world-wide.

And if you are tight on funds, which one would you pick to have?   Yup, it is the "carry it with you everywhere" smart phone.   Especially if you live in a country that just grew cell phone towers and doesn't have a copper wire going anywhere except to carry electricity?

Worldwide -- cell phones rule.   Your second machine is a tablet or a smart TV if you have a second machine.