Google Didn't Sell Motorola Home So Much As It Gained Arris
If you've been watching Google over the past few months (or years if you watched closely), you've been seeing them move closer and closer to a fully armed and operational battle station made to take on the smartphone universe top to bottom. What we've just seen this evening here in the USA is a trade (though they call it a sale) between Google and the broadband media technology company known as Arris with "Motorola Home" being given to Arris in exchange for $300 million in Arris shares and a seemingly much more significant monetary lump sum ($2.05 billion) – but hear this: Google will own about 15.7% of Arris at the close of this transaction: this could potentially be much more important than the TV Set-top business they've just sold.
Google will eventually have a business model where you, the consumer, will pay them for the smartphone and the data it uses, owning the hardware and the software in-between as well. It's only a matter of time. With the move Google has made today, they've made it abundantly clear that they're all-in with mobile even if they don't want to be the one-stop-shop. With a dropping of the business they've just exchanged with Arris, the most significant non-mobile portion of Motorola they acquired earlier this year will be gone.
In its place will be a stake in a company that works with a wide variety of broadband technologies. Google has seen clearly a future in which the way we watch and engage with media will not be a singular box that sits near a device called a television. Instead we'll be working with a wide variety of displays that connect to displays – controllers that work with controllers, and touchscreens for all!
Of course thats a wild dream for a future in which there are no Google Nexus Q devices, but judging by the wide range of devices that exist in the Arris portfolio, Google just traded a passing fad for a wide open internet-connected book of possibilities. Stay tuned to SlashGear as we continue to investigate what exactly Google attained here and what it means for their future mobile business – and their command of the home, as well.
[via Arris]