This week, Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer took part in a conference call hosted by Gleacher & Company, an investment firm. No surprises here: someone asked Oppenheimer what Apple thought of the $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google.
Oppenheimer’s response? Classically understated. “$12.5 billion is a lot of money.”
You should probably read “too much money” into that statement for Apple’s snide opinion on the matter.
Questioned on the matter father, Oppenheimer said that Apple believes in competition, but that companies must invent their own technology rather than steal or borrow the ideas of others. He said that the open market would eventually settle what was the superior product.
Translation? Google overpaid for Motorola because it needed to protect itself from litigation based upon stealing all of Apple’s ideas, and Jobs and Co. are mostly bemused by it, especially since those patents haven’t stopped Apple from suing the pants off of Motorola before. Moving on!
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
