But What About Motorola?

This is something I can honestly say I never saw coming. I have spent the last 24-hours looking at all the info and opinions about the situation, but after the knee-jerk reaction and shock have worn off I’m more confused and a bit worried than anything else.

I understand why Google make the move. It makes perfect business sense. They get to make basically the same amount of money off of Motorola without having to tie up any resources or shuffling anymore staff around. Despite, how massive Google is, they have sent a good number of people to Motorola after the acquisition, including a few people from their upper management. While this isn’t a devastating blow to Google by any means, it still takes time and energy to find replacements for them.

Google also stands to gain a good bit of stability and control over the Android ecosystem by selling off Motorola. It is VERY clear that Samsung was gearing up for a post Android mobile world if Google should ever want to bring Android completely in house and use Motorola as their own brand like Apple does with the iPhone. Samsung, in the last year or two, has released an app for just about every Google app that’s on the market currently, including music and movie services, along with its own app store.  Now most users, won’t touch these programs as most users have continued to use the Google services they are familiar with.

But nevertheless, it has given companies like Samsung a forum to release and work on replacements should they ever need to fall back or something other than Google for their services. Samsung has even gone as far as to make their own OS, Tizen, which features all of these apps and services.

With all the unrest that Samsung has been demonstrating over the last year or so, it makes it very clear to see why Google would want to get rid of Motorola. Google even had to pull Samsung aside to work things out at CES this year, in which Google had to talk Samsung back off the ledge and help them come back to a more unified Android look and feel. Google owning an Android OEM, no matter how thick the firewall was, was bad for Android/ Google business as a whole. 

I understand Google’s reasoning and the business sense behind the deal. I also understand why Lenovo would want to make the deal. It gives Lenovo a foot hole into the US mobile market. Lenovo makes IMPRESSIVE stuff, if you haven’t check out their phones, you need to! But they don’t have a name people recognize in the mobile phone industry. While Motorola has the third most recognized brand. This will definitely get more people talking about and aware of Lenovo, and it will help to get more Lenovo phones on carriers as they can make deals for Lenovo phones and Motorola phones at the same time.

This is all well and nice for Google and Lenovo, but what happens to Motorola? It is VERY clean, if you have ever touched a Moto X, that Motorola has been very influenced by Google. While the design language hasn’t changed to much, on the software side, there are a lot of little touches that are very Google about the Moto X. From the Moto Spotlight augmented reality video that comes on every handset to the animated boot animation they added for the holidays, you can feel the Google effect.

I hope that Lenovo lets Motorola continue to be Motorola. It would be great to see the two companies learn from one another and grow together. Lenovo can teach Moto a lot about hardware, while Moto can teach Lenovo about how to customize and streamline product and software updates. I hope that they can work together instead of just absorbing Motorola into the folds of Lenovo. Unfortunately, only time will tell what the future holds for Motorola. 

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