Google Agrees to Acquire Motorola Mobility
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Google announced an agreement to acquire Motorola Mobility for about $12.5 billion in August 2011. Motorola was an Android handset maker, but one of the most important assets in the deal was its large portfolio of mobile patents.
The smartphone industry had entered a period of intense patent litigation involving Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, and others. Owning patents related to cellular communication and mobile devices gave Google more leverage to defend the Android ecosystem.
The acquisition also created an awkward platform relationship. Google supplied Android to many hardware manufacturers while now owning one of their competitors. Google later sold most of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo in 2014 but retained a substantial patent portfolio. The episode showed that mobile-platform competition involved intellectual property and supply-chain strategy as much as operating-system code.