- Lyons has always been an ass, but when did he get so bitter?

- you just look childish when, only after losing the auction, you then claim you didn’t really want the thing anyway (google never cried sour grapes on nortel)

- Motorola knew they had Google by the balls. ... and they made Google pay and pay handsomely

The trick is not to get fooled by the reasonable-sounding phrases like: Another way to look at this story... and That’s not to say it wasn’t a bold, brash move, or even... the right move.

To those of you discussing Gruber's position on patents: it is the patents that change position relative to Gruber. :)

edit: typos, formatting

Think how much real innovation $20 billion could have created if it weren't for the shitty patent system.

I get that Gruber's mainly going after the over-the-top Lyons piece (a piece which strikes me as poorly thought out and terribly argued). But it does seem like this is Gruber's first move toward a pivot away from the importance of patents in Android vs. Everyone.

You know, those patents that Gruber has been trumpeting for weeks now as the death knell of Android.

Just ignore those.

[1]: Or cheaper?: See recoiledsnake's comment below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890038

Only on HN or Reddit is Gruber's pro-Apple stance not the most boring conceivable topic. It's embarrassing to see ostensibly smart people pick it apart, as if it was faceted and nuanced.

I myself love Daring Fireball, because Gruber is an f'ing good writer. But I could give a sh!t about discussing him on HN. Anyone else want to just start flagging these things off the site? Look at these silly comment threads. You'd be doing a lot of people a favor by nipping them in the bud.

He mostly just appears to be a pro-Apple pundit who has a popular blog that gets a lot of revenue in advertising. But I never see Cringely or Dvorak posts upvoted. What gives?

This does not seem to be very reasoned analysis. He calls the CEO childish and Android (the largest smartphone OS in the US?) desperate. This feels like a hyperbolic opinion piece. What should I be getting out of this article?

Given the trajectory of Apple, where would the web be in 10 years if Google wasn't throwing everything, and clearly they are doing so, at keeping their platform alive.

Android is about keeping the web a dominant platform as we shift to the next generation of computing.

Google is right to bet the farm on keeping that endeavor alive.

It appears as though they got backed into the corner, but we've never seen Google make a purchase like this.

It's more expensive than usual. And it's not an obvious up-and-comer.

I imagine the #1 thing they could do would be to start picking off staff from both companies to form a super-group to push the hardware into yet unknown territory.

(As a person whose career interests align with Google's I hope the knock it out of the fucking park.)

Say what you will about Gruber and his Apple fanboyism, this rings true to me. By and large, the article seems very astute.

So what is wrong with that loaded closing statement? Well lots. Firstly he admits the patents part was a good move for Google and the Android platform. He also does math and says they bought 3x Nortel patents for 3x the price. So essentially Google got ton of other Motorola stuff (hardware division, cable modem, set top boxes, Android handset software team et.al) for free. Plus so far as I can tell Droid is a pretty well known and fairly successful brand and Motorola's management did the right thing in saving the company from going down under - not exactly misguided. Gruber would perhaps only call them guided if they did not compete with Apple in any way shape or form!

And what did Gruber had to say when Apple spent billions on Nortel patents? Nope not desperation or anything. Just the fact that Google lost was super important and Android was going to be in trouble.

Gruber also leaves us with no insight on what Google could have done better. He also doesn't feel nearly as bad about Google having Apple by the balls on Nortel patents and making them pay good for Nortel patents, as much as he does about Motorola having Google by the balls by just doing what any sane business will do to maximize its valuation. In comparison actually Google got an arguably better deal - 12.5B for 25000 patents, and a whole functional, moderately successful hardware company with diverse business.

P.S. Motorola has done phones long before Apple thought about it. As such they know a whole lot more about the hardware part as I can tell by the signal and voice quality of my Moto phone. Google and you will find many that can make reliable phone calls with Motorola phones when iPhone could never. So dissing Motorola may be fashionable but I think they know better.

Last quarter they sold 4.4 million smartphones, up from 2.7 million the same quarter last year. (If you're more interested in market share as depicted by Asymco's graph then they're growing slightly at around 5% of the smartphone market, compared with say Apple which is growing slightly at around 15%, or Samsung which has gained 15% in the last year to just under 20%.)

Even if you like to play the Asymco game of including dumbphones that don't run Android to make Android look bad, they still increased total phone sales year-on-year, to 11 million, meaning their increased Android sales replaced a smaller number of lost dumbphone sales.

Google spent 12.5B. Motorola has 3B in cash. The stock market thought motorola was worth around 6-7B incl cash (assuming they weren't just factoring in a takeover already).

So google really paid around 6B for the patents, they don't have to do anything to motorola. They can sell all or parts of it, maybe muck around with some of the parts of Motorola other than cell phones. But either way the Nortel auction was 4.5B for JUST patents while google gets a mobile electronics company + patents for its 12B.

And they paid… nearly three times as much...

and a phone company came free?

Personally I am hoping to hear an announcement of the Xoom 2 as soon as possible.

The buyout can't have been solely for the patents, because Motorola are losing patent battles. It's unlikely that it was just to own a phone manufacturer, because why buy a 3rd rate one at a 60% premium? So why? Because Motorola had Google by the balls and could have further fucked Android up for everyone else.

It's a shame how every discussion of a Daring Fireball article here collapses into 'Gruber is a fanboy', but it's particularly frustrating when it's an insightful article like this one. If he's half as bad as some of you make out, it should be easy to argue the points without resorting to attacking the man.

He is absolutely wrong on whole "patent wars" issue. Of course GOOG is showing its "big brother" attitude time to time but his beloved AAPL is not clean either. This holier than thou attitude sucks!

Moto may be "second-rate" mobile maker. They may be in loss. GOOG is not stupid to shell out 12B "just" for patent portfolio. Always remember GOOG thinks ahead of everyone. People were criticizing GOOG when they made Android open and free. They were criticizing about paying too much money to YouTube (which is on fire now). GOOG is definitely smarter than Gruber.

I don't see how you're getting a reversal out of that. Talking about Motorola's problems is only to highlight that Google would not have spent $12.5 billion on the company if not for the patent issues.

Sometime Gruber posts interesting theories or observations, and in that case I'm all about discussing them, but this article is just filler for his core demographic.

"I’m continually impressed by the quality of the comment threads on Hacker News, for example."

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/16/powazek-comments

Soon after I started flagging posts from sources I didn't like, my flag links vanished.

It is also about the topic at hand and people defending Gruber's(or Asymco's or Marco's) pro-Apple bias as if it were somehow insightful or interesting.

> It's embarrassing to see ostensibly smart people pick it apart, as if it was faceted and nuanced.

It is more embarassing to see otherwise smart people defend it in the comment threads (eg. people saying that a sales comparison of 20 year old failed consoles with current Android tablets today somehow indicates that those tablet makers will fail and should shut shop instead of trying).

>Anyone else want to just start flagging these things off the site? Look at these silly comment threads. You'd be doing a lot of people a favor by nipping them in the bud.

Who upvotes these stories(beyond the reach of flagging) with shallow analysis favoring Apple anyway? I don't think it's the crowd arguing against Gruber's posts. It is people that think that the analysis worth spreading and discussing about.

This is the reason for the disconnect between the HN commenters and the flame wars. It's just hard for people to understand others almost-bordering-on-religion obsessions and biases.

While you say you'd be fine with banning DF from HN, we all know which segment of HN'ers vote up DF, Asymco and some of Marco's stories here, some of which have very convoluted and shallow arguments/analysis/math which seem cherry picked and tailor-made to prop up one particular company and don't withstand five minutes of reasoned analysis.

The problem is that some of these articles are "something that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" (from the HN guidelines) to a group of people rooting for a company and totally shallow drivel to others, so no wonder it's all a flamefest that isn't going to go away soon.

You want to analyze Gruber? Look at his writing style, which is clearly influenced by David Foster Wallace. He's a damn good writer! Otherwise, take him for what he is -- an Apple pundit with one part brilliance, two parts vitriol -- and stop worrying about what he said 6 months ago. Pundits reverse themselves constantly.

EDIT: I forgot to mention his taste for design and art. I'm more interested in his take on Kubrick's films than anything he writes about Apple.