Details of the agreement were not disclosed, but the tech behemoths said it includes cases related to Motorola Mobility. “The companies will dismiss all pending patent infringement litigation between them, including cases related to Motorola Mobility,” Microsoft and Google said in a joint statement on Thursday.
Google last year sold Motorola Mobility to Chinese computer giant Lenovo in a deal valued at $2.9 <g data-gr-id="34">billion,</g> but held on to patents. “Separately, Google and Microsoft have agreed to collaborate on certain patent matters and anticipate working together in other areas in the future to benefit our customers.”
The kind of collaboration the industry rivals have in mind was not disclosed. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has made a priority of making the company’s applications and cloud services available across mobile devices, regardless of what software powers the hardware.
Microsoft would also like to boost the popularity of Windows smartphones and tablets with popular Google offerings such as YouTube.
Meanwhile, India may soon displace China as Silicon Valley’s next frontier, a leading American daily has said, days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the headquarters of technology giants Tesla, Facebook and Google.
“China may be a Silicon Valley obsession, but India increasingly is in the conversation and may soon displace its Asian neighbour as tech’s next big frontier,” the popular USA Today said on Thursday in a news dispatch from San Francisco.
The first Indian Prime Minister to visit California in more than three decades, Modi over the weekend spent several hours at the headquarters of iconic companies such as Tesla, Google and Facebook.
He also had interactions with the top CEOs including Tim Cook of Apple, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Google’s newly-appointed Indian-origin CEO Sundar Pichai. “The near-future was on full display last week,” USA Today said referring to Modi’s meetings in the Silicon Valley.
“The Facebook of India is Facebook. The Google of India is Google,” Beerud Sheth, CEO of <g data-gr-id="30">Teamchat</g>, a communications app with employees in India and the US, was quoted as saying.
“In China, those services are banned,” he said. Silicon Valley, in the southern San Francisco Bay Area, is home to hundreds of start-ups and global technology companies, with Google, Apple and
Facebook among the most prominent.