Did Google royally mess up when it bought Motorola?

David Martin, the founder and CEO of patent consulting firm M-Cam claims that Google's aquisition of Motorola was an "immense mistake". 

Speaking with Bloomberg, Martin noted that Motorola sold off it's valuable assets years earlier and that the 17,000 patents Google recently acquired in the deal are, in his words, "crap patents".

Supposedly, only 18 patents in the portfolo were deemed important for protecting Android - but in the end all these patents might do is make Google a bigger target for litigation.

The reason? Martin's explatination as reported by Windows SuperSite:

"It's an immense mistake," Martin says in an interview on Bloomberg, referring to Google's blockbuster $12.5 billion patent acquisition of Motorola Mobility. "What they've bought is crap. Motorola [had already] sold off its good assets. Back in the early years, Motorola sold off some MPEG patents to GE ... After that, they took a bunch of the Freescale patents and sold those off. [Motorola's current patent estate, which Google is trying to buy,] actually has a huge dependency on Freescale, and Freescale actually has an Apple link."

"So you have this very interesting strategy where Google thought through the present," Martin continues, "but didn't actually do its homework on the patents."

Whoops!

One would hope Google has more sense than this. If avoiding lawsuits was truly the main objective, it seems possible that the deal could be an epic fail on Google's part. 

On the other hand, Google could be more interested in the manufacturing side of things then they originally let on.

As Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop noted, Android partners shoud be worried about the Motorola deal.