Lenovo buys Motorola: the latest news on Google's big sale

Motorola won't be assembling phones in the United States for much longer. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the company will close its Texas factory — essential to its Moto Maker assembly process — by the end of this year. Motorola has since confirmed the unfortunate news to The Verge. And the reason is simple: Motorola's smartphones aren't selling well enough to keep the place running. "What we found was that the North American market was exceptionally tough," Motorola President Rick Osterloh told the Journal. The decision potentially leaves hundreds of American workers out of a job.

The plant's fate was thrown into question after Lenovo announced plans to purchase Motorola Mobility from Google early this year. On the conference call announcing that deal, Lenovo executives were cagey in discussing what would happen to the facility, though they did say they expected to turn Motorola's fortunes around in just a "few quarters." With the Moto X not selling as well as expected and Motorola bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars each quarter, closing the Texas plant is an obvious step towards profitibility.

There's a new person in charge of Motorola Mobility. Rick Osterloh has been named president and COO of the mobile company — which is in the midst of a sale to Lenovo. Osterloh takes on his new role immediately and will report to Google until Lenovo's purchase of Motorola is finalized and approved. After that, it's really anyone's guess how long he'll stick around. But at least for the immediate future, he's at the helm of the Moto X maker.

And according to outgoing COO Jonathan Rosenberg, Osterloh played a big part in the reinvention of Motorola that occurred under Google. "Rick is a Silicon Valley veteran and a familiar face across Motorola, where he has been leading all product management and helping to define the ‘go forward’ strategy for the past two years," said Rosenberg in a blog post announcing the change.

Patents didn't save Motorola. The Moto X smartphone didn't save Motorola. Under Google, the company was an absolute money pit. And yet, Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing believes he can turn Motorola's fortunes around within a matter of months, not years. "In a few quarters we can turn around the business," he told Bloomberg, in an interview following the company's Q3 earnings announcement.

Last month Google announced that it was selling off Motorola Mobility to Lenovo, and the inevitable executive shakeup is coming to pass. According to The Wall Street Journal Dennis Woodside, who became Motorola Mobility's CEO when Mountain View bought the company, is headed to Dropbox as the company's first chief operating officer.

Woodside had actually been an executive at Google for years before taking the Motorola job, and made such an impression in Silicon Valley that Apple's Tim Cook actually tried to hire him away from the company at one point. However, despite overseeing phones like the Moto X, Woodside was unable to jumpstart Motorola's mobile business, which eventually lead to the Lenovo sale. According to the Journal's report, Woodside will be stepping in to provide oversight of Dropbox's growing business, which under current management has reportedly lacked the kind of high-level experience that someone of Woodside's caliber can provide.

In a new interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked for his thoughts on Google's pending sale of Motorola to Lenovo. "I wasn't surprised," Cook said, calling the deal "a logical transaction." Cook pointed out that Motorola was a financial disaster for Google — a point many others have raised as reason enough for a sale. But Apple's chief executive also took a shot at Mountain View, describing Motorola as something that Google wasn't "committed to."

"I think it’s really hard to do hardware, software and services and to link all those things together," said Cook, repeating one of Apple's longstanding talking points. "That’s what makes Apple so special. It’s really hard, so I’m not surprised that they are not going to do that." Of course, Google still does those things  — to some extent — with its Nexus line of Android products (and the Chromebook Pixel). Cook also brought out another point of trash talk we've heard before, saying that "the experience on Android tablets is so crappy because the app is nothing more than a stretched out smartphone app."

By Nilay Patel and Ben Popper

Google’s romance with Motorola was star-crossed from the start. With the $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola it wasn’t just taking on an ailing manufacturer — challenge enough — but simultaneously competing with Google’s own hardware partners in the Android ecosystem, meaning it had to tread carefully. The payoff for all that heartache? Motorola’s impressive collection of 24,000 patents and patent applications. Unfortunately for Google, the much-ballyhooed war chest of intellectual property didn’t hold up in the courtroom.

With Google and Samsung developing a closer partnership than ever, this week might not be the best time to try and make inroads in the hypercompetitive Android smartphone business. The Korean company already enjoys a vast lead over its rivals and is now ideally positioned to continue dominating in both the US and abroad. Shrugging off the size of that challenge, Lenovo has decided to buy Motorola Mobility for $2.91 billion and step up its efforts at becoming a smartphone vendor with a truly global reach.

The world’s biggest PC maker today, Lenovo, was anonymous to many until just recently. But in 2005, the Chinese company that only two years earlier had renamed itself from the generic Legend acquired a brand name and cachet that catapulted it to global renown. Lenovo bought IBM’s personal computer business for $1.75 billion, the star jewel of which was the well respected ThinkPad brand. After engendering only blank stares outside of China, the Lenovo name became recognizable almost overnight. There were questions as to whether IBM’s signature quality and durability would be maintained by the less reputed Chinese company, but in order to ask, you had to know its name first.

Google's blockbuster $2.9 billion sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo won't include the Advanced Technology and Projects group led by former DARPA director Regina Dugan.  The news was confirmed today on a conference call with Lenovo, and sources familiar with the matter say the group will be integrated with Google's Android team, where Dugan will report to Sundar Pichai but maintain a more independent role.

Dugan, who was named to The Verge 50 earlier this year, manages a team of just under 100 people, all of whom will be moving from their current offices in Sunnyvale to Google's Mountain View office.