“The combination might make Motorola successful — again,” said Mr. Cooper, whose patent from the early 1970s for cellular phone technology is among those that hang at the company’s entrance.
At the least, industry analysts said Motorola almost certainly would become a laboratory for Google to seek to perfect Android, its mobile phone software, in concert with newly acquired hardware engineers. Others say Google may wind up giving financial backing to Motorola to help it revive its flagging fortunes in Europe and Asia.
But if it appears to be getting too cozy with Motorola, Google risks upsetting other mobile phone makers like HTC and Samsung, who build some of the most popular smartphones and tablets running on Android.
“How do you compete with your partners and also work with them?” said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie Capital, who called the situation a “head-scratcher.”
Google has said it will allow Motorola to run independently. But some analysts and investors think Google could markedly pare back or sell big parts of Motorola that create conflicts with partners or are not central to its goals. And that makes for uncertain times for the 19,000 employees at Motorola Mobility in Libertyville, a northern suburb of Chicago, and around the world.
“It’s like, thanks for everything you did in the 20th century, but you’re being bought by a search engine,” said Roger Entner, a telecommunications industry analyst and founder of Recon Analytics, a market research firm. He added, “Nobody ever buys a company and leaves it alone.”
Motorola traces its beginnings to 1928, when two brothers, Paul and Joseph Galvin, started a company making power converters for household radios. In 1947 it changed its name to Motorola, after its popular car radio brand. The company produced radio phones that helped American troops communicate in World War II, car phones in the 1980s, and the trend-setting MicroTac and Razr cellphones, among other products.