Monday, August 15, 2011

Goo-MoMo

On the Internet, predictions are free, so here's mine:

This is actually good news for HTC, LG, Ericsson, Samsung, etc. Google has neither the interest nor the desire to be a consumer-facing device manufacturer; they are a software company and they know it. I predict that, within 18 months, MoMo will be spun back out as a smaller but still viable company; Google will retain the patent portfolio, some selection of the strongest software groups, the most research-oriented of the hardware teams, and little else; there will be a major Google office at 600 North U.S. Highway 45 in the Silicon Prairie, though :)

In the meantime, Google will use that stable of 24,000 cellphone-related patents to keep plenty of intellectual property attorneys and courtroom staff employed, and the end result will be a Supreme Court decision that will annihilate software patents (at least for the time being).

This is, I'm afraid, a flat-out disaster for that company that bought Java and decided it was useful only for litigation purposes, as well as for that most-valuable-company-on-the-planet further South, which was hoping that an early lead and a fanatical user base would enable it to keep prices sky-high and never need to open its mobile iPlatform.

As I said, predictions are free; mine is worth nothing. But if you wanted informed speculation, you'd have looked elsewhere, after all :)

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