Google has officially closed the deal for the acquisition of Motorola. Now Motorola is fully owned by Google and Google has already announced some changes like replacing the CEO of Motorola with one of their Senior VP’s, and cutting 30% of the workforce, which makes sense since Google will need Motorola to be as lean as possible and flexible to their plans for the future. So what can we expect from Google becoming a hardware company?
Better devices
Google will get to add designers to Motorola that will make their devices more exciting, and hopefully avoid design complacency like we’ve seen with Samsung and their Galaxy S3, for their future phones and tablets. I think Google will really want to compete with Apple here, so they will do their best to have extremely well design and built smartphones and tablets.
We might even see such a device this fall, because while the acquisition has just been completed, Google has been working closely with Motorola for quite a while, and they announced this acquisition a long time ago. Surely, they must have something planned for this fall together with the launch of Android 5.0.
Stock Android
While this is no guarantee, it doesn’t make any sense for Google to continue to allow Motorola to mess with the new Android versions once they are finished with them. Can you imagine Android engineers finishing Android 5.0, and then sending it to Motorola, and Motorola having their own engineers that add whatever else they want to Android 5.0? That doesn’t make much sense to me. They will most likely just use Android as it is, and have a faster time to market as well.
Together with all manufacturers launching stock Android devices this fall, this should be a big push for stock Android in the market. This will create a feedback loop because even more people will get used to it, and then even more people will demand stock Android from manufacturers. The manufacturers might never give up their skins for good, but we should at least see plenty of choices for those of us wanting stock Android, which would be a huge improvement compared to the current situation.
New types of devices
Google will not be limited to just phones and tablets. They are already planning on releasing those Google Glasses maybe later this year, or early next year, and there are a bunch of other products they could sell through Motorola: smart watches, set top boxes, Android laptops or Chromebooks, and who knows what else they come up with.
I think the next 2-3 years will be very exciting for Google as they start becoming known as a manufacturing company for their exciting new products, and thanks to Android they will have a lot of loyal fans and a huge network of blogs dedicated to it willing to buy these new devices and promote them.