The mobile sphere has become increasingly competitive over the last few years with giants coming into the platform.
In an official blog post from Google, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond believes recent actions from Microsoft and Apple indicate a partnership of sorts bound with the common bond of stopping Android’s fast growing success in its tracks.
According to the post,
Android is on fire. More than 550,000 Android devices are activated every day, through a network of 39 manufacturers and 231 carriers. Android and other platforms are competing hard against each other, and that’s yielding cool new devices and amazing mobile apps for consumers.
But Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.
To summarize what he says; Apple, Microsoft and Oracle are engaged in an anti-competitive strategy, fighting the smartphone battle through patent litigation, rather than with new features or innovation.
Drummond believes this strategy is also raising the price of patent portfolios, well beyond their true value. Nortel’s patent portfolio recently sold for $4.5 billion, over five times the pre-auction estimate of $1 billion.
For an end user, if these companies are successful, it makes difficult for manufacturers to release new devices due to additional costs. This could result to less Android devices or higher price tags.
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