So this happened today: Google is selling Motorola Mobility to Lenovo. $2.91 billion, mostly cash and stock, and Google is keeping basically the entire patent portfolio for itself. Which, if you think about it for more than five seconds, is a pretty wild sentence to type about a company Google paid $12.5 billion for back in 2012.
I'm writing this on the couch with my Moto X sitting on the arm next to me, and I keep picking it up like it's going to feel different now. It doesn't. Still the same curved back, still that slightly-too-small screen next to what everyone else is carrying these days, still running stock Android with none of the carrier junk I had to deal with on my last phone. I bought this thing in October, went through the whole Moto Maker thing online, picked a black front with a walnut back panel because I thought it'd be a fun little conversation piece. It was assembled in the Fort Worth, Texas plant, which Motorola made a big deal about at launch, this idea of an American-assembled phone in 2013 being some kind of statement. I don't know if that plant survives this. Nobody's said, and I doubt Lenovo is going to prioritize keeping a domestic assembly line running for a phone that, lets be honest, didn't sell anywhere near what it needed to.
The patent thing is the part that actually matters here and I think it's getting buried under all the "Google buys company, Google sells company two years later" headlines. Google spent most of that $12.5 billion two years ago specifically to get its hands on Motorola's patent library, as leverage against Apple and Samsung and everyone else suing each other over rounded corners and slide-to-unlock. They're not handing that over to Lenovo. Lenovo gets the brand, the handset business, about 2,000 patents, and a bunch of engineers. Google keeps the war chest. So in a weird way this isn't really Google giving up on hardware, it's Google admitting the hardware part was never really the point.
I have zero idea what this means for future Moto phones. Presumably there's a Moto X follow-up already somewhere in the pipeline that's too far along to kill, so maybe we get one more "Google era" Moto phone before Lenovo's fingerprints are all over the software. And that's the part that actually worries me a little, because the best thing about this phone has been how little bloat is on it. No dumb carrier apps, no duplicate app stores, just Android doing Android things with a couple of nice touches layered on top, the always-listening "OK Google Now" thing and that little screen that shows notifications without fully waking the phone. If Lenovo starts loading it up with their own overlay the way Samsung does with TouchWiz, I'm out. I say that now, we'll see if I actually follow through when it's time to upgrade.
Small tangent, not really related, but Lenovo's history here is a little funny to me because they already did this exact move once before. They bought IBM's ThinkPad business back in 2005, and somehow the ThinkPad line got better after that, not worse, which is not what anyone expected at the time from a Chinese PC maker taking over an IBM brand. I still think the ThinkPad keyboard is the best laptop keyboard ever made and I will die on that hill, nothing from Apple has come close since they started shaving key travel down to nothing. So maybe there's a version of this where Lenovo actually takes Motorola somewhere decent. I'm not counting on it, but it's not impossible either.
What I keep coming back to is just how fast this all moved. Motorola Mobility was Google's big hardware bet, the company Larry Page stood up on stage for, the thing that was supposedly going to let Google build phones the way Apple does, tightly integrated top to bottom. Less than two years later it's basically a patent-stripping exercise with the leftover business handed off to whoever'll take it off their hands for a fraction of the purchase price. That's not a failure exactly, since Google clearly got what it actually wanted out of the deal. But it's a strange thing to watch happen to a phone you bought four months ago, sitting there on your couch arm not looking any different at all.