So the DOJ finally gave Google the green light on the Motorola Mobility deal today. $12.5 billion, and it's done, or close enough to done that everyone's treating it as done. I've been half-watching this thing since it was announced back in August and honestly I'm surprised it took this long. Not because the deal itself is complicated to understand (Google wants patents, Google wants a hardware arm, fine) but because you'd think a company with Google's lawyers could push something through faster than six months.
The official line from the Antitrust Division is that the deal is unlikely to hurt competition, which, sure, I guess if you squint. What I keep coming back to is the patent stash. Motorola's sitting on around 17,000 issued patents plus another 6,800 or so pending, and that's really what this was about the whole time. Not Droid phones. Not some grand plan for Google to become a hardware company overnight (though maybe that's part two). It's ammunition. Apple and Microsoft have been suing basically every Android manufacturer that exists over the last two years and Google needed something in its pocket to shoot back with. Now it has a very large something.
The DOJ apparently also tacked on a warning about "potential anticompetitive use" of those patents, which is a nice way of saying don't get any ideas. We'll see how long that lasts. My guess is about as long as it takes for the first countersuit to land.
I'll admit I don't have strong feelings about whether this is good or bad for Android as a platform. Ask me again in a year. What I do have a strong feeling about is how exhausting the whole smartphone patent war has gotten. Every week it's some new filing, some new injunction request, some judge in Germany or Texas deciding whether a rounded corner is a protectable design element. I just want to buy a phone without feeling like I'm funding a legal arms race, and that ship sailed a long time ago.
Separately, and this has nothing to do with Google, I want to point at something that's been eating my lunch breaks all week: the Double Fine Kickstarter. Tim Schafer's studio put up a page asking for $400,000 to make an old-school point-and-click adventure game, the kind of thing publishers won't touch anymore because it doesn't fit a quarterly spreadsheet. They hit the goal in something like eight hours. Blew past a million dollars before the first day was even over. Last I refreshed the page it was still climbing and showing no signs of slowing down.
I backed it for twenty bucks, mostly out of nostalgia (I grew up on Grim Fandangoand Day of the Tentacle) but also because I think this is a genuinely different way of funding creative work and I want to see if it actually holds up past one viral case. It's easy to say "wow, crowdfunding is the future" off one data point, and I'm trying not to do that. But watching a studio go around every publisher, every venture path, every traditional gatekeeper, and just ask the people who'd actually play the thing? That's worth paying attention to regardless of how the Google patent stuff shakes out.
Two completely different stories, same week, and if you squint they're both about who gets to control what gets built and who profits off it. One's playing out in courtrooms and antitrust filings involving tens of billions of dollars. The other is a bunch of nerds on the internet throwing five and twenty dollar pledges at a guy who made LucasArts games in the 90s. I know which one I find more fun to follow, even if I know which one actually moves markets.
Anyway. Back to my actual backlog of stuff I'm supposed to be writing about this week, which includes a half-finished post on RSS readers now that Google's apparently starting to neglect Reader (a topic for another day, and one that's going to make me cranky).