With the announcement of their planned $12.5B Motorola Mobility acquisition this morning, Google is buying a lot of stuff. They’re buying 20,000 employees (almost doubling their headcount.) They’re buying an absurdly daunting armory of over 24,000 patents (I mean, come on: Motorola has the patent on the cell phone.) But there’s one more thing that Google’s buying, and it’s one that shifts up the Android game all together: nearly 30% of Android’s existing marketshare in the U.S.
After years of owning next to none of the hardware marketshare for their own software platform (even the so-called “Google phone” Nexus devices are made by HTC and Samsung), Google has just become Android’s 2nd biggest manufacturer.
At 29%, Googorola sits in the second place seat, just behind HTC (35%) and ahead of Samsung (25%). That stat comes from numbers pulled fresh this morning by mobile analytics firm Localytics.
Some of the things this could mean:
Motorola recently announced that they would be tapering off the development of Motoblur, and now we know why. Google doesn’t want their own handset manufacturer changing up Android — that would imply that something is wrong with Android. While Moto might have one or two more devices in the pipeline with BLUR on deck, expect all of their new stuff to run vanilla Android sooner than later.
It’ll be interesting to see how this affects other manufacturer’s skinning efforts. Will they fall back to vanilla Android because that’s what most users will come to expect, or will they strengthen their UI tweaking efforts to differentiate their wares?
Google just instantly shot from zero to 60 (well, zero to 30% — but you get what I mean) in a race they long pretended to have no interest in. They stood aside and let the major manufacturers raise Android to the top — and now that it’s there, they’re swooping in and taking a commanding control of the hardware side of things. Is it evil? Perhaps a bit. But it’s also downright genius. Marketshare maintained, Google will have final say over what happens to thirty percent of the hardware sitting in pockets, and be able to sway the other manufacturers accordingly.
Expect Android to do nothing but improve, and fast.
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: MSI) is a data communications and telecommunications equipment provider that succeeded Motorola Inc. following the spin-off of the mobile phones division into Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. in 2011. The company is headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. Motorola Solutions is composed of the Enterprise Mobility Solutions division of the former Motorola, Inc. Motorola Solutions also previously had a Networks division, which it sold to Nokia Siemens Networks in a transaction that was completed on April...
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