[fjtorres]

I dunno...
The Nortel auction suggests Google's nose might not be big enough to buy any meaningful patent protection.
Microsoft already had an iron clad license for the Nortel portfolio and they still chipped in, just to make sure Google wouldn't have access to them; a pure take-away play.
You don't make a move like that if you're not prepared to repeat it.

Google has a lot of enemies eager for payback that should be willing to join the Apple-Microsoft alliance. And, for that matter, some of the android vendors might see getting their own private protection as a way to get a competitive advantage on their unprotected brethren.

If those patents are *really* that fundamental (obviously the seller wants to puff up the portfolio's value) the bidding war might drive the price beyond what Google might ever get from android; Google has deep pockets but so do their foes. And it looks like those foes (and not just Oracle) smell blood...