Michael Mace, who knows more about mobile computing than just about anyone around, is deeply skeptical about Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility. “Either Google’s worldview will dominate and ruin Motorola, or worse yet the Motorola worldview will infect Google,” he writes in an insightful post on his MobileOpportunity blog. “Google with Motorola inside it is like a python that swallowed a minivan.”
Mace, now CEO of Cera Technologies, knows whereof he speaks, having held executive posts at Apple, Palm, and Palm’s ill-fated OS licensing spin-off, PalmSource.
One big problem he sees is Google’s lack of experience in hardware: “Speaking as someone who worked at PalmSource for its whole independent history, an OS company always believes that it could do a better job of making hardware than its licensees. It’s incredibly frustrating to have a vision for what people should do with your software, and then see them screw it up over and over. The temptation is to build some hardware yourself, just to show those idiots how to do it right. I think maybe Google just gave in to that temptation.”
The full post is well worth reading.