If you heard a loud thud, I apologize; that was my jaw hitting the floor. In a surprise announcement, tech giant Lenovo has purchased Motorola from Google. This staggering $2.91 billion sale has allowed Lenovo to leapfrog from having no footprint in the U.S. market to a decent chunk of mind-share and a not too shabby slice of the Android pie.
This shocking move raises all kinds of questions. Will Lenovo change the phone’s skins? What will happen to products already in the pipeline? Keep in mind that we just now started seeing phones influenced from the original Google purchase hit the market in the form of the Moto X and G. Does this mean we’ll have to wait on new Motorola/Lenovo products? How will tablets be branded? Will Lenovo be more aggressive in pushing handsets than Google, enabling it to grab the market share? Oh and hey, Lenovo has a smartwatch now (in the form of the MotoACTIV).
In one quick purchase, Lenovo threw a challenge down to the entire U.S. tablet, smartphone, and smartwatch markets. Takes the sting out of having the bid for BlackBerry quashed, that’s for sure.
Man, i kinda liked where Moto X went. i was super pleased with the rate of updates of the original. I was gonna wait until the second iteration of this phone before i took the plunge…. now i’m not so sure anymore.
So, basically, Google bought Motorola to get the patents, then sold off the rest of the business. I suppose it makes sense from the standpoint that Google is primarily a services company, not a hardware company.