Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Ericsson, RIM and EMC grabbed 6,000 (yes six thousand) patents on wireless technology from Nortel for $4.5 billion! Google was planning to spend just $900 million to get them. The enemy of my enemy… you got it. A blog post has a lot of details on this acquisition:

Some consortium members get patents, some get royalties, and some just get freedom from having to pay royalties.

At the end of the day this deal isn’t about royalties. It is about trying to kill Android.

At the same time Microsoft is getting $5 for each Android device from HTC, Wistron, General Dynamics and is heading for Samsung, Motorola and others. The patent strategy proves to be worthy, too.

A very good reading on smartphone strategy written by one of the best analysts in the industry: One cuckoo, two turkeys and three horses; how the mobile race has changed | VisionMobile :: blog. This article is five months old but I remembered it while reading about the fight over Nortel’s patents.

There will be an increase in the use of patents to fight the cuckoo club and the almighty Apple.

And he continues:

Microsoft + Nokia: running with four legs

In the past few months Nokia realised that in order to halt its slide towards irrelevance, it had to take its head out of the sand and instead take a leap of faith. The brave gamble that Nokia has now chosen is perhaps not the ideal one, but it was the only strategy available for long-term survival and is a bold rejection of the short-termism demanded by short-sighted investors in accepting the call of the cuckoo. In tying Nokia and Microsoft together they have created a rather old-fashioned type of partnership but it will be a partnership of bones not a collection of feathers.

We’ll see…