Come Fucking On →

Nilay Patel in The Verge with Andy Rubin’s comments at the Mobile World Conference on the separation between Google and Motorola:

Rubin said he was “painfully aware” of concerns, but stressed that Google has “literally built a firewall” between the Android team and Motorola. “I don’t even know anything about their products, I haven’t seen anything,” he said. “They’re going to continue building Motorola branded devices and it’s going to be the same team doing it.”

This is a sop towards device manufacturers worried about Google playing favorites with Motorola. But pretending that at some point people from Google are not going to be involved with Android phone development at Motorola is just bullshit.¹ Google spent $12 billion dollars on the company, and even though the purchase decision was largely driven by the current patent situation, it would be terrible management to not try and leverage Motorola’s other assets.

Google’s already replaced the CEO of Motorola with Dennis Woodside, their former head of American ad sales. It could be just that the mergers and acquisitions process is going to be a mess — Woodside spent a couple years as a lawyer doing just that — and Motorola Mobility is a huge, sprawling company. It could even be that Woodside is there to pick the bones of Motorola Mobility clean and spin it off in the future. He was a management consultant after all.

But thinking he’s not going to pick up the phone and be talking to Larry about what’s going on with their Android phones? And that Larry may not have a little word with Andy? That’s just delusional.