And they're selling it for $2.91 billion.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/...-mobility.html

$12.5 billion purchase price - $2.35 billion for motorola home - $2.91 billion = $7.24 billion lost....

I'm sure they kept some assets but $7.24 billion worth? Ouch.....

Patent grab. That's all they want. They already have enough manufacturers churning out devices for them, and they never even gave Motorola a leg up and kept that division isolated from the android team, so it didn't ruffle any other maker's feathers.

Now they have a patent sharing agreement with Samsung, and there's actually talk they will get preferred access to the sdk and apis that may mean they can bake extra features in and really cut down on a lot of the bloat of having to skin a good portion of things on top through the launcher.

Drop in the bucket. Google can use the write off...