For last some days we have been hearing about Google’s struggle to gain more and more patents to salvage Android. In the same fight, it also went ahead to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion and got in return about over 17,000 confirmed patents and over 7,500 pending patent applications.
But even after spending this amount of cash, will Google be finally be able to give fight patents hoards? You will get the answer in the following chart made by mobile analyst Chetan Sharma. This chart does not take in account the quality of a patent; this is just based on numbers.
Who has the most number of mobile communication related patents?
As you clearly see, the problems are far from over for Google. Motorola’s patents does give it some protection, but don’t think all these lawsuits are going to disappear.
As the Google blog post by Drummond pointed out any smarthphone platform may involve over 250000 patents. Therefore all mobile platforms are infringing each other. No one can possibly own all the patents and neither can they develop software without potentially infringing each others patents. But having a large portfolio of patents is a deterrent for patent suits.