Comment Not too surprising (Score 1) 172
Google's main priority is the Android ecosystem. One attractive property of Android is the level-playing field (or at least one that is only reasonably bumpy rather than mountainous). Google's ownership of Mobility gave it patents that will probably be useful, and of course they aren't letting go of those, so what is sold is not what is bought. Google's ownership of one player can at least give the impression that Google will favour its own, or at least will tend to under commercial pressure. Letting Mobility go, even for a significant writedown compared to what they paid, may in the long run be repaid in the value of Android compared to what it would have been had Google held onto Mobility. We can never tell, though, since we can't do a copy-on-write fork of the universe, and run both cases in parallel: and if we could there would surely be better uses for the facility than evaluating smartphone economics.