> And today it all makes sense. Google just sandbagged its rivals. The whole thing was a rope-a-dope maneuver. Google never cared about the Nortel patents. It just wanted to drive up the price so that AppleSoft (those happy new bedmates) would overpay. Today, with the Motorola deal, Google picks up nearly three times as many patents as AppleSoft got from Novell and Nortel. More important, Google just raised the stakes in a huge way for anyone who wants to stay in the smartphone market. > > Better yet, Google got its rivals to spend a few weeks defending the practice of using patents to attack other companies. Apple fanboys bent over backward to say that Apple was doing the honorable thing here by suing everyone in sight. All this slimy patent warfare that is so despicable when others do it becomes magically noble when Apple does it. Teaming up with other companies, including the evil Borg, to gang up on Google is all perfectly legitimate, par for the course, smart business practice, blah blah. > > So now Google fires back, makes a huge acquisition, gets into the hardware business, buys up the best IP portfolio in the mobile space — and can position itself as a victim that’s just trying to defend itself against this gang of bullies. And people say Apple fanboys drink the Kool Aid.

Let’s start with “nearly three times the patents.” Yes, Google acquires nearly three times the patents in this deal than they would have from Nortel. They also paid nearly three times as much. (12.5 billion vs. 4.2 billion. AND they wouldn’t have been on the hook for that entire 4.2 billion; they could have joined the consortium and paid a fraction of that.)

Next: “Google just raised the stakes in a huge way for anyone who wants to stay in the smartphone market.” Huh? They’re playing catchup here. Nothing more. Our broken patent system and the recent influx of patent troll companies raised the stakes over a year ago, and Google was losing—badly. Remember, this is the company that claims to not believe in patents; in order for Google to “win” on its own terms, or to “raise the stakes” it would have had to do something that made patents irrelevant, not just drop a bomb of cash to play along by everyone else’s rules.

I’m not faulting Google for playing along, mind you; they really didn’t have any choice. But to say this is some brilliant maneuver is silly. It’s defense, plain and simple. And it’s a risky defense at that, considering how it will certainly strain Google’s relationships with other hardware partners.

Next: “Apple fanboys bent over backwards to say that Apple was doing the honorable thing.” NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE has said that any of Apple’s behavior when it comes to patents has been “honorable.” I’ve seen lots of defenses along the lines of “well, the system is broken, and Apple just has to play within the confines of the system” type arguments. But that’s a long shot from calling any side in the patent war “honorable.”

And finally: Google can “position itself as a victim that’s just trying to defend itself against a gang of bullies.” Yeah, that, or they can position themselves as a bunch of whiny hypocrites who once claimed that patents were evil, but now are going to start using the very evil they once denounced to kill off smaller competitors like Microsoft, HP, RIM. Once again, Google does what is best for Google, and everyone else can go stick it. “Don’t be evil” my ass.

My guess is that most Apple fans will see Google’s move as interesting, albeit unimaginative. They lost HUGE in the Nortel thing, so they turned around and made a somewhat bold and probably not completely well thought out acquisition to remedy their mistake. They dropped a lot more money and added baggage to already strained partner relationships because they don’t know how to play the game properly.

It fits into Google’s usual pattern. Smart people, lousy at politics. The question is whether the long-term benefit of having better legal defenses will outweigh the strain this move will put on partners like HTC, Samsung, etc.

Remember, not too many people were suing Google, anyway. Most of the suing has been between Apple, Microsoft, and Google’s partners. This acquisition doesn’t protect HTC or Samsung at all. If Google starts filing motions to intervene in those lawsuits, than I’ll be happy to call that move “honorable.” Somehow, I don’t see that happening, though.

> Rovio Entertainment, the created of the popular “Angry Birds” game, is in talks with an interested investor to receive funding that would see the company valued at $1.2 billion, according to a new report. I love Angry Birds as much as the next guy, but anyone who doesn’t see this as an obvious sign that another bubble is about to burst here in the Silicon Valley Tech world is crazy.

After all, what has Rovio done SINCE Angry Birds? More and more Angry Birds. No new ideas. No second hit game. All that money, simply reinvested into more marketing, more ways to milk the same product.

They are a company without new ideas. And they’re looking to others for money, despite their incredible revenues.

I thought a company’s worth, whether or not it would make a good investment, was a reflection of the company’s potential for FUTURE greatness. I’m not seeing that from Rovio at this point. Unless they have some other brilliant new game up their sleeve that no one knows about, and it’s costing them a ton of money to develop.

I think it more likely that they have no new good idea, so they’re making a push to sell off what’s left of their one hit. One last big cash in.

But what do I know?

> The company notes that “Starting October 1, smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may experience reduced speeds once their usage in a billing cycle reaches the level that puts them among the top 5 percent of heaviest data users. This is not surprising. And my guess is it’s just the beginning. Expect more stringent throttling soon.

Lots of my friends and some prominent bloggers kept their “grandfathered” plans last year when AT&T dropped the unlimited plan. They were no doubt thinking as long as they kept paying the higher fees for the old unlimited plan, they’d be able to keep that indefinitely. This, despite the fact that many of them don’t use anywhere near the 2GB a month cap on the cheaper $20 plan.

But I dropped my unlimited immediately, figuring that at the very least, when 4G comes out, AT&T would come up with some excuse why that was a DIFFERENT data plan, and thus wasn’t eligible for unlimited. Now it looks like they’re not even going to wait until the 4G iPhone rolls around.

So why pay $10 a month more in the meantime for something you’re not using, if in the future, when you need that extra data most, the carrier is just going to pull the rug out from under you anyway?

> That 250 gigabytes-per-month works out to about one megabit-per-second, which costs $8 in New York. So your American ISP, who has been spending $0.40 per month to buy the bandwidth they’ve been selling to you for $30, wants to cap their maximum backbone cost per-subscriber at $8. > > That doesn’t sound unreasonable on the face of it. Capping consumption at 20-times the provisioning level doesn’t sound so bad, but I think it sets a dangerous precedent. > > These data caps are actually a trap being set for us by the ISPs. > > Data caps that may make logical sense today make no sense tomorrow, yet once they are in place they’ll tend to stay in place. Great article by I, Cringely.

I’ve been thinking this ever since the talk of data caps started several months ago. Just like with variable pricing on music in the iTunes store, these sorts of pricing changes are never designed to actually help consumers. In the sort term, they look to make things cheaper for us. So most of us fall for it. But over the long run, they are cleverly hidden price hikes.

And the worst part is that none of it is necessary to keep ISPs in business. This is all about increasing profits. Nothing more.

2GB today sounds like a lot. 2GB a year from now might be average monthly use. 2GB ten years from now may very well be average DAILY use. Do you really think the ISPs are going to keep raising the amount of data you get for the same price over time?

Just when the Internet is becoming a necessary utility, companies are setting up the infrastructure to divide us up between those who can afford to pay for the data, and those who can’t. They’re turning something as essential to our future as running water and electricity into something only rich people can afford. And we’re going to suffer greatly as a nation because of it.

> IHS memory analyst Dee Nguyen said Apple’s move to the cloud could have “significant implications” on the memory market. “With Apple products like the iPhone and iPad accounting for a disproportionate share of NAND flash demand, any move among Apple users to offload storage to the company’s iCloud service could mean a corresponding decrease in demand for physical NAND flash memory in the future,” the analyst said. Wow, that’s one of the stupidest arguments I’ve heard in a long time.

Does this guy not know how iCloud works? Does AppleInsider not have enough sense to see the flaw in his logic?

iCloud doesn’t diminish the need for local storage. At. All. It actually increases the need for storage on all your devices, because YOUR FILES ARE GOING TO BE SAVED LOCALLY ON ALL YOUR DEVICES.

So instead of having one copy of that file on your laptop, you’re going to have one on your laptop, one on your iPhone, and one on your iPad. Three times the storage. You’re going to want MORE RAM on your iPhone, not less.

iCloud is not a streaming service. This isn’t Google apps. Data is stored locally.

Sheesh.