MMI (the handset part that split off from the rest of Motorola, now called MSI) has a decent chunk of patents.
* Carl Icahn publicly made statements last week that he'd like to see MMI get some revenue from those patents
* Now Jha follows this with his statement... not rocket science here folks.
Having said that, MMI is in a really bad place - they've found themselves in a commodity market, competing with manufacturers who used to make Motorola phones. Android leveled the playing field tremendously, much to Motorola's chagrin.
Yes, a no-cost OS. Great, manna from heaven for the company that was bleeding literally billions of dollars. Now we can cut a bunch of product lines, phone and all of the R&D staff associated with those cut phones. Yay! We'll be profitable again!
Wait, not so great, look at all these other people getting Android for free. Oh jeez, they know how to make hardware just as good as we do... maybe even cheaper and faster...
So Motorola struggles to somehow differentiate themselves from HTC and company, and Blur is the answer. But Blur is hated by the geekerati (and for good reason). And Verizon pimps other phones from other manufacturers as Droids too, so not any exclusivity there either.
So, the long term doesn't actually look good, so they're reaching out to Microsoft for WP7 and also trying to figure out how to slow down their Android competitors.
Patents! That'll do it!
Well, we'll see if their patent portfolio actually has anything in it that the other guys need. I suspect there might be a bunch of older patents in there, as Motorola cut way back on R&D starting around 1999. Maybe these older patents have punch still, maybe they don't. We'll see. If you don't hear a lot about this over the next 6 months then you'll know it was bluff.
