After Google's Android chief Andy Rubin reached out to Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha in early July about the Nortel patents Google had just lost to a dangerous rival, Google wound up bidding $30 a share for the whole company on August 1.

MMI was supposedly afraid it would be defenseless without its 17,000 patents. Advised by Frank Quattrone's indomitable Qatalst Partners, it wanted $43.50 a share.

Google went to $37. MMI dropped to $40.50, according to an SEC filing, and settled for 40 bucks a share, a tidy $12.5 billion and a 63% premium, $10 to maybe $15 more than MMI's board originally thought it could get.

Google shelled out $3 billion or 33% more than its initial offer in the absence of any rivals.

Android litigation follower Florian Mueller says, "This isn't a defensive purchase in the sense of Google becoming strong enough to retaliate seriously against its strategic rivals (mutually assured destruction). It's defensive-defensive in the sense of merely attempting to prevent an exacerbation of the Android patent situation due to what MMI was going to do otherwise."

He says MMI was holding four aces, played the "buy us or else" card and forced Google to pay "protection money" so MMI won't damage Android, not to protect Android against Apple and Microsoft.

Between the SEC filing and what MMI was saying publicly at the time, Florian figures it was threatening to take a royalty-bearing patent license from Microsoft and possibly settle with Apple - which would have forced pretty much every other Android device maker to surrender on the patent front; cut a Windows Phone deal with Microsoft; used its patent portfolio to sue other Android widget makers; auction itself and/or large portions of its patent portfolio off, maybe to Apple and if MMI itself went to the block "it would have looked like the admission of a top three Android device maker that its strategy didn't work out well enough for that company to stay independent, and it's unclear whether another acquirer would have continued MMI's Android-only strategy."

Florian dismisses out of hand the notion that MMI's patents are "remotely" as strong as Nortel's. If they were it would have made more sense for Google to dicker with MMI before the Nortel auction in June.

One of Google's problems with MMI's patents, he says, is the fact that, like Nortel's, the best of them are encumbered by FRAND licensing commitments, which defensively makes them second-class patents.

It's not a problem the Rockstar crew may have. Since they bought them out of bankruptcy, they might contend that all existing agreements and FRAND licensing commitments entered into by Nortel are null and void since Nortel has ceased to exist. "With MMI, there isn't even a shadow of a doubt that Google will have to honor MMI's contracts."

Florian says, "Sometimes it feels like I'm almost the last man standing to say that Google's proposed acquisition of MMI is not primarily a patent purchase, and to insist that MMI's portfolio is certainly not the kind of protective shield that could take care of the Android ecosystem at large."

See http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/09/these-four-threats-against-android.html for Florian's unabridged discussion.