Lenovo Buying Motorola from Google
Google has just announced that it is selling Motorola to Lenovo in a deal worth $2.9 billion. This will give the Chinese company a major presence in the U.S. phone market, and a bigger role in the tablet one.
Lenovo appears to be getting ready to eat the world. Just two days ago, the huge Chinese company announced that it would snap up IBM’s low-end server business for $2.3 billion. That’s more than five billion in impulse shopping, and they aren’t buying from the bargain basement – Google and IBM are top of the line companies.
Of course Lenovo got its start by buying IBM’s PC business, and has done quite well with it. It’s setting out to dominate the Chinese tech market with a zaibatsu-style stacked conglomerate that does everything in its perceived niche, from smartphones to the Cloud.
And they aren’t limiting themselves just to mainland China.
A single data point: My personal laptop is a Lenovo. (Thinkpad R61, if it matters.) I’m not sure how long I’ve had it but it’s been at least three years, and my wife had it for a while before that. It’s seen moderate-to-heavy daily use and not-infrequent use by a toddler/preschooler/first grader. I’ve been complaining about it since I got it, nothing serious but a hundred little things, but, you know, it’s still working. The keyboard is as good as it ever was (not very), the display is as good as it ever was (not very), and it just generally has kept working while my wife’s and both sons’ laptops have all bitten the bit bucket.
I’ve still got a nice little Lenovo laptop that weighed three pounds I bought five years ago. It runs fine. I’ve got it rigged with Ubuntu these days. I traded out its HDD for a 128GB SSD that cost me only $700 bucks at the time.