Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
The motorola deals cost them over $10B in losses.
Think they've made that much net off Android?
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Oracle says Google has made $22 billion net on Android, Google says they've made nearly nothing -- maybe half a billion. But Motorola didn't cost them $10 billion in losses either. When they bought Motorola for $12.5 billion, Motorola had $3 billion in the bank. Then they sold off one division of Motorola for $2.5 billion -- so they we're down to $7 billion. Then they sold their phone division for $3 billion to Lenovo, so that leaves $4 billion in "losses" -- except Google retains Motorola's huge patent library. But, more than that, Motorola's brief ownership of Motorola allowed them to drive the design of Android phones. Before Google's Moto G (the first high quality, inexpensive Android) the phone makers were making pure crap Android phones that could barely get out of their way. By competing with the Moto G (and later the even cheaper Moto E) Google was able to force Android phone makers to use higher spec CPUs that could run their "ad-rich" Android phones. So I think Google got a lot more out of their Motorola purchase than Microsoft got from their Nokia purchase. Microsoft recently wrote off $7.6 billion for that failure.