Yesterday afternoon, Google confirmed that they had sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for about $2.91 billion. Which is roughly $10 billion less than what they acquired Motorola for in 2012. While Google is keeping many of the patents, Lenovo is getting about 2,000 of those patents, as well as being able to use the ones that Google has. So now Google is completely out of the hardware game, or are they?
You may remember that just a couple of weeks ago, Google bought Nest for about $3.2 billion. Now according to TechCrunch, it appears that Google has big plans for the Nest team. Google is looking to keep the Nest group intact inside the search giant. With this new division still working on hardware devices, but not necessarily just thermostats and smoke detectors, which is what Nest is already manufacturing. It’s said that Google wants Tony Fadell, the Founder of Nest also the designer of the original iPod for Apple, to work on gadgets that make more sense for Google. However, it’s still unclear on what that hardware might be.
Tony Fadell has a long history with creating great hardware. Not only at Nest – but as mentioned before – Fadell also worked for Apple on the iPod and was a founding member of the iPhone development team. It’s said that many consider him one of the best executives that understand both sides. That’s hardware and software. And that he’s pretty comfortable at working at the intersection of both hardware and software. Once more, Fadell was able to attract great Apple engineers over to Nest when he first started that company. These engineers wanted to follow Fadell’s plans. And it appears that is why Google acquired Nest.
Google has stated that when it comes to a budget, they are willing to allow Nest to use as many resources as it needs. Basically this means that Google is getting serious about hardware, and Motorola was just letting them get their feet wet. This kind of makes more sense with the Motorola sale now. Especially since they almost got Nest for free. But it appears that Google will finally have a great team of engineers to build some great devices. Now just exactly what those devices will be? Well we’ll have to wait and see.
Source: TechCrunch