Never one mind the implications for Motorola’s devices, the upcoming Droid Bionic, the next Nexus device, etc., and focus on what this buyout really means. This is a throwback to the nuclear arms race, or in other words, mutually assured destruction, by means of software patents.

The U.S. Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of one recent patent auction to “protect competition and innovation in the open source software community” and it is currently looking into the results of the Nortel auction. Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.

And when they talk about strengthening their portfolio, they’re not joking. Back when the Nortel patents went up for auction, Google was outbid by over USD $1 Billion for them, and all 6000 patents went to the Apple/MS/RIM consortium.

In comparison, Motorola has over 17,000 patents, a bounty nearly 3-fold over the Nortel portfolio.

This is ramping up to absolutely ludicrous levels, with all of the giants trying to level one another with a patent battle. If this isn’t reformed soon, it will eventually wind up taking down the industry here in the US.

I have no idea what to make of this. As one of maybe six people in North America who actually thought the Seinfeld ads were kind of funny in a surreal, post-modern way (I also thought the use of David Costabile was great…), I don’t see how this new campaign is suddenly going to fix it. Using Apple’s exact marketing campaign is akin to John McCain taking Obama’s exact “Change” slogan & running with it. Ultimately, it feels transparent and is completely ineffective.

I simply cannot fathom how a company like Microsoft can get their advertising so wrong. Sure, Microsoft has never been strongly associated with fun, XBox aside, but surely they can do better than this.