Google and Motorola.....things if the deal would have happened in 2010

Google just plunked down $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility. Would the deal have been cheaper if Big G had just purchased a handset maker back in January 2010 rather than launching the ill-fated Nexus One instead?


To figure that out, we need to look back at the state of Motorola some 19 months ago and apply some mathematical magic.


The thought experiment


When the Nexus One was introduced, Motorola sported a market cap of about $10.6 billion. That's for the entire Motorola beast, including the infrastructure and enterprise operations that later became Motorola Solutions. At the time, mobile devices represented 31 percent of Motorola's sales and did not generate profits. The only fair division available is to split the company along revenue lines.


Thirty-one percent of $10.6 billion is $3.3 billion, and Google is paying 3.8 times that amount. If the deal falls apart for some reason, like failing regulatory approval or due to Motorola's shareholder vote, Google will pay a $2.5 billion breakup fee that nearly equals our hypothetical early-2010 market cap.


In slightly more realistic terms, Google would probably have needed a similar-sized buyout premium back then. This would put the theoretical buyout price at $6.2 billion, or about half of the final price tag.


When Motorola separated last December, the final value of Mobility was one-ninth of the total company—Motorola shareholders received one Mobility share per eight regular shares. Using that ratio instead, you'd get a fair price of $1.9 billion including the buyout boost.


The road not taken


Any way you slice it, Google could have saved a truckload of cash by getting into the hardware game much earlier. Its bold plan to revolutionize the way cell phones are sold fizzled early on, and the Nexus One became nothing but a developer phone in less than six months' time. We don't know what that failed experiment ended up costing Google, but most of the pain was probably passed to Nexus-maker HTC.


Since then, Android's reference models have jumped from one manufacturer to another, including the Samsung-designed Nexus S and Motorola's Xoom tablet. With this acquisition safely under its vest from an early date, Google could have kept that zig-zagging firmly under control and in-house, while also clamping down on the much-maligned Android fragmentation issues.


Moreover, a stronger, Moto-powered patent portfolio might have encouraged Apple to keep its litigious fingers away from Samsung and HTC. Google could have been an official white knight standing by to help any handset designer in Apple's crosshairs. (Then again, Samsung is no slouch in gadgets patents either and Cupertino sure is going after that target. And Oracle would still be complaining about misused Java code. There are no magic bullets in the patent wars.)


On the other hand, Google would also have lost a chance to build the diverse support system that Android now enjoys. Some call it fragmentation and others call it choice or diversity; from that perspective, Mountain View would be probably better off leaving Motorola alone altogether, though it did manage to round up quotes from handset manufacturers saying they support the buyout.


What's new?


Ironically, buying Motorola Mobility makes Google a truer copy of the Apple business model. No longer a hands-off software provider with no financial interest in handset sales, Google now needs to worry about hardware implementation and direct profits. This two-headed beast will deliver the purest Android experience on the market, and will be held up as a role model or pariah when things go right or very wrong for the platform.


And let's not forget that Motorola Mobility might not go home with Google after all. Perhaps the biggest reason to pick up Motorola rather than just buying another basket of protective patents is that regulators might block a pure patent deal but could let this agreement pass because Google is buying hardware operations where it holds no monopoly whatsoever. That doesn't make it a slam-dunk, however.


All told, leaving Motorola on the table for a year and a half added at least $6 billion to the dollar cost but also brought about a slew of less obvious costs—and benefits.


For better or worse, Android just changed in a big way. And if Google had made this move a year ago, the market would look very different today in that unpredictable way that makes hurricanes out of fluttering butterfly wings.

Barefoot into Cyberspace

Barefoot into Cyberspace

ADVENTURES IN SEARCH OF TECHNO-UTOPIA

by Becky Hogge

Contents

§             Prologue: Fierce Dancing

§             Chapter 1: Digging the command line

§             Chapter 2: Courage is contagious

§             Chapter 3: Information wants to be free

§             Chapter 4: Just kids

§             Chapter 5: Anarchists in the UK

§             Chapter 6: Information Overload

§             Chapter 7: Learning to love the Goolag

§             Chapter 8: Ciphers and Doppelgangers

§             Chapter 9: Infowar

§             Epilogue: Return to Chaos

§             Acknowledgements

§             Glossary

§             References

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“Mankind’s sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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Prologue: Fierce Dancing

When I was sixteen, I read a book called Fierce Dancing: Adventures in the Underground. It was written by CJ Stone, a columnist for the Big Issue, and it was about the free party and road protest movement in Britain. Although I was a bit too young to have ever been to a proper free party, to join convoys of crusties on the way to an unsuspecting field in the heart of the British countryside and dance straight for twenty hours, I’d been to the odd local rave. Around Brighton, where I grew up, sound systems could set up in a forgotten pocket of the South Downs for a few brief hours before being disturbed by a police force now empowered by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 to shut us down. We had a lot of fun.

Fierce Dancing filled in the blanks, it told the stories of the alternative cultures – pagans, new age travellers, punks and drop-outs – that had coalesced around this scene and contributed to its vibrancy. It told tales of women who gardened vegetable plots in no knickers, tepee valleys in the depths of Wales, and how to make poppy tea. It was, in that most adolescent sense, a revelation. And to an adolescent growing up in the consumerist nineties, seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and seventeen years into the rule of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party where alternative ideas about how to live seemed only to exist to sell ice cream and health drinks, it was also an escape. I’d often wondered what had happened to all the hippies. My favourite film at that time was Easy Rider. The legacy of the counterculture was celebrated in books and on TV, but, outside of the odd rave, the world around me seemed to contain little of the freedom, the rebellion and the exuberance that the sixties had supposedly promised.

For Stone, I suspect Fierce Dancing was a kind of eulogy. I suspect, from the way he speaks about them, that he didn’t expect the communities he was recording to survive much longer. The book itself is now out of print. I spoke to its publisher at a drinks party recently, who told me that it had sold around 25,000 copies. That figure is, apparently, “not bad for a zeitgeist book”.

Barefoot into Cyberspace, the book you’re about to read, is a zeitgeist book, too. At least, that’s what I intended it to be. At the end of 2009 I set out to record for posterity characters that, since I left adolescence and Brighton behind, had played key roles in the digital counterculture I eventually settled in to and that I suspected was about to disappear. These characters weren’t the “rip, mix, burn”, iPad-wielding social media consultants and purveyors of gadget-prop so often associated with the web. They were hackers and geeks, command-line cowboys, info-terrorists and civil libertarians. They had seen in the rise of many-to-many communications technology an opportunity to free modern society from corrupt institutions, to develop new ways of organising away from the imperative of industrial capitalism, and to seize agency and power from the jaws of the consumerist beast.

For the time that I travelled with them, I believed these things, too. I believed in them enough to abandon my career as a journalist and run an organisation called the Open Rights Group (ORG) which, as well as fighting to protect basic civil liberties online, campaigns against any kind of regulation that could prejudice the liberating aspects of the ’net. I don’t run ORG anymore, which is probably a good thing given how sceptical I became that its mission could succeed. It wasn’t that I didn’t think the techno-Utopians were onto something. I simply feared that the institutions of the old world they thought they could topple – be they corporations, media or politicians – had a lot of fight left in them.

But if Barefoot into Cyberspace was intended to be a eulogy, I hadn’t figured on WikiLeaks. Almost from the moment I started collecting material for this book, their story began to trespass on mine. By the end of the year – 2010 – in which the majority of this book was written, the culture I’d been a part of for almost a decade was headline news all over the world. It’s too early to tell what effect that will have on the techno-Utopian dream. All I can say is that it transformed this project from an exercise in cultural anthropology into something more like an adventure story. As a result, I had more fun writing this book than I could have imagined when I started it. I hope you enjoy reading it just as much.

Becky Hogge, June 2011

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Read This

This book is distributed by Barefoot Publishing Limited under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence.That means:

You are free

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Under the following conditions

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Guide to Setup Gmail IMAP in Outlook 2010

Guide to Setup Gmail IMAP in Outlook 2010

Gmail is one of the email services which supports IMAP feature which enables to send and receive emails from Outlook without any ads. Besides one use Outlook for all the business mails and now you can also add your personal gmail account along with it. The advantage of having setup this using IMAP is that when you read a mail or delete a mail, it is synchronized with both the web version of Gmail and the Outlook.

There are lots of features which are different in the new Outlook from Office 2010 than Outlook 2007 which makes it even more desirable to use Outlook for your Gmail.

Having said that, now lets see How to Setup Gmail IMAP in Outlook 2010?

Before you can start using Gmail IMAP in Outlook, we need to enable IMAP in Gmail settings.

In Gmail, go to Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP –> Make sure Enable IMAP is checked and click on Save Changes if you made any.

If you are starting the Microsoft outlook 2010 for the first time, you will be seeing the following startup screen, just click Next and choose Yes in the next screen where they ask would you like to configure an email account?

Note: If you already have another email account or if you have chosen No in the earlier case and has already gone through the initial outlook startup settings before, follow this screenshot else continue to the next one.

Click the Office button on the top left corner and go to the Office Backstage. Under Info –>Account Information –> Click Account Settings and Click on Add Account. 

On the Add New Account screen, just choose Manually configure server settings or additional server types and click Next.

Choose Internet E-mail, connect to POP or IMAP server to send and receive e-mail messages and click Next.

Here give the User information, enter your Name, your full email address including @gmail.com or your @custom-mail.com.

Under Server information,

Account Type – IMAP

Incoming mail server – imap.gmail.com

Outgoing mail server (SMTP) – smtp.gmail.com

Also enter the logon information, enter your user name in full and enter the password.

NOTE: Now don’t click Next yet, click on More settings above it.

In the Internet email settings, go to Advanced Tab to change the server port numbers.

Change Incoming server (IMAP) to 993 and use SSL as the encrypted connection.

Change outgoing server (SMTP) to 587 and use TLS as the encrypted connection.

Now go to Outgoing server tab and check My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication and choose Use same settings as my incoming mail server.

Now you should be taken back to the Add new account screen, click on Test Account Settings and see if everything works without any errors. If there are any errors go back to all the settings and recheck if you have entered correctly.

Click Ok and Finish.

Now you will be taken to the main Outlook window and on the left sidebar a new set of folders will be created to synchronize with the Gmail account. It will also include Drafts, Sent Mail, Spam, Starred, Trash and all other mails synchronized.

Note: If you have a huge Gmail account already, then it will take sometime to download all your email contents from the web server.

 

Setting up the Sent Items Folder

When you send a mail for the first time, it will ask you where to store the sent mails. Make sure you DO NOT SET the sent mail from Gmail. When you send a mail through outlook, it goes to the gmail server and it saves the sent mails automatically to the sent mail folder. Now if you try to save it again in the sent mail, it will create duplicate copies of the sent mails. So use the Local Folder. See my other post on Choosing the Sent Items Folder while using Gmail in Outlook

Setting up the Deleted Items Folder

In gmail, you can either archive a mail or delete a mail. When you archive a mail, they are removed from the Inbox but they still remain in All Mails folder but when you delete they are moved to the trash mail folder and eventually deleted permanently after 30 days.

Likewise, you can set the action to move the mails to trash folder when you delete them.

If you want to archive a mail but not delete it, I usually have a folder called arhive and move the mails there so that my inbox remains clean and concise.

Folders and Labels

Outlook Folders are equivalent of labels in gmail. If you add a mail to two labels it will be present in both the folders.