So this happened yesterday and I'm still turning it over in my head: Google sold Motorola to Lenovo. $2.91 billion, cash and stock, announced January 29th. Which, if you're keeping score at home, is about a quarter of the $12.5 billion Google paid for the whole company back in 2012. Google's keeping most of the patent portfolio and the Advanced Technology and Projects group (the folks who were working on the modular phone thing, Project Ara), and Lenovo gets the Moto X, the Moto G, the brand name, and roughly 2,000 employees.
I want to be clear that I don't think this is some huge shock. Everyone who follows this stuff even a little has been saying for months that Motorola was a patents-and-hardware-experiments play for Google, not a "we want to make phones forever" play. But it still stings a bit, and here's why: I've had a Moto X since November and it's genuinely the best Android phone I've used, by a wide margin. Stock-ish Android, that always-listening "OK Google Now" thing that actually works most of the time, a camera that's fine (not great, fine), and it fit in my hand in a way the Galaxy phones just don't. My last phone was a Droid RAZR on Verizon and before that I ran an actual flip-phone RAZR V3 in college, so I've got a weird nostalgic soft spot for this company that I'm aware is not a rational business opinion.
The thing I keep coming back to is the timing. Lenovo has had a busy month. Back on the 23rd they announced they're buying IBM's x86 server business for about $2.3 billion, and now six days later they're picking up a phone maker too. That's over $5 billion in acquisitions in about a week for a company most Americans still mostly associate with ThinkPads. Lenovo bought the ThinkPad line off IBM back in 2005 too, so there's a pattern here of "buy the hardware division a bigger company doesn't want anymore, run it lean, actually make money on thin margins." It worked for laptops. Whether it works for phones in a market where Samsung and Apple eat basically all the profit is a different question entirely.
What I actually care about, selfishly, is whether the next Moto X is going to be as good as this one. Motorola under Google was weirdly good at shipping a phone that didn't feel like it had fifteen different product managers fighting over which app to preinstall. No Verizon bloatware nonsense, no bizarre duplicate app store, no "My Verizon" app I can't delete. If Lenovo starts treating US carriers the way Samsung does, stuffing the thing full of junk to make Verizon and AT&T happy, that's the whole appeal gone. I genuinely don't know which way this goes. Lenovo's never had to deal with US carrier relationships at this scale before.
There's also a smaller, dumber thing nagging at me, which is that Google spent two years and twelve and a half billion dollars owning a hardware company and mostly what came out of it, publicly, was one genuinely good phone line that never sold in huge numbers. The Moto X reportedly sold something like half of what Google was hoping for in its first few months. I don't think that's really Motorola's fault so much as Google being bad at marketing a phone against Samsung's ad budget, but it's still a strange return on that kind of money, even accounting for the patents.
Anyway. I'll keep using my Moto X until it dies, whoever ends up owning the name on the back of it. If the software update situation gets worse under Lenovo I'll probably grumble about it here in a few months, so, you know, stay tuned for that particular saga if you're into watching me complain about firmware.
One more thing worth saying: this deal still needs regulatory approval in the US and China, so "Lenovo owns Motorola" isn't actually true yet, just announced. These things usually take a few months to close. I'd guess sometime this fall, but I've been wrong about merger timelines before.