That said, one thing has clearly shifted. Microsoft is now taking on Google directly, given that the Motorola deal closed on Tuesday. So a German court decision Thursday that certain Motorola Android products infringe on Microsoft patents can officially be chalked up as Microsoft’s first direct hit to Google.

The ruling was actually a split one, as the court ruled that Motorola does infringe on a patent related to text messaging but does not infringe on another patent related to localization.

“We’re pleased the court agreed today that Motorola has infringed Microsoft’s intellectual property, and we hope Motorola will be willing to join other Android device makers by taking a license to our patents,” Microsoft deputy general counsel David Howard said in a statement.

Motorola, meanwhile, was pleased that the court ruled in its favor on the other patent. As for the one it was found to infringe on, Motorola told AllThingsD that it “will explore all options, including appeal.”

“This is one element of a global dispute initiated by Microsoft,” Motorola said.

The biggest changes made on Tuesday were at the top of Motorola’s organizational chart. In addition to the exit of CEO Sanjay Jha, several other Motorola executives are leaving the company. Among those on the way out, we’re told, are strategy chief John Bucher, Senior VP Alain Mutricy, supply chain head Mike Fleming, chief marketer Bill Ogle, HR head Scott Crum, operating chief Juergen Stark and CFO Marc Rothman.

Also leaving is well-regarded enterprise unit head Christy Wyatt, a former Apple and Palm executive. Responsibility for the corporate push will shift to Mahesh Veerina, the senior VP of software and services.

Beyond that, though, Google is holding back with the drastic changes. Motorola remains
a separate subsidiary, employees are keeping their same email addresses and the iconic Motorola logo will remain.

Naturally, the first day of business consisted of lots of “get to know you” town hall meetings with Motorola employees learning about life under Google and meeting some of their new leaders. To give Motorola’s conference rooms a bit of that Mountain View vibe, a few Googlers brought along lava lamps.

Google is making its presence felt in other ways. In addition to new CEO Dennis Woodside, Google has brought in a new HR head, financial chief and marketing lead. Google also said that Regina Dugan, the recently recruited former DARPA head, will lead a new advanced research unit within Motorola — a move that some employees are taking as a sign that Google is committed to serious R&D at its newest unit.

Google did hint that Motorola’s future could be more narrow than the broad array of devices it makes today.

“Motorola Mobility will have a simpler, more focused strategy,” Googorola said in a statement. “You will see fewer, but bigger launches.”

Although Google didn’t mention job cuts in its public statements or in its meetings with employees, layoffs are expected. Fewer products likely means fewer people needed to develop and manufacture those products.

Also unclear is the fate of the TV products unit that makes set-top boxes. Some see this as a natural fit with Google TV, while others say much of the unit could be sold if the right buyer can be found.

The acquisition had been held up by government approval processes, the last of which came from China over the weekend.

As expected, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha is stepping down; Dennis Woodside, who oversaw the acquisition on Google’s side, will replace him. Woodside was formerly Google’s president of the Americas region, and before that, built Google’s businesses in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe and Russia.

The Motorola deal gives Google access to some 17,000 patents granted and another 7,500 pending, across a wide range of technologies — 2G, 3G, 4G LTE, and video compression and decompression — plus Motorola’s phone, tablet, set-top box and other hardware businesses.

Woodside said in a statement, “Our aim is simple: to focus Motorola Mobility’s remarkable talent on fewer, bigger bets, and create wonderful devices that are used by people around the world.”

Google CEO Larry Page added in a blog post that he expected the Motorola team “will be creating the next generation of mobile devices that will improve lives for years to come.”

The Googorola leadership team will also include Regina Dugan, the recently departed director of DARPA, who will lead an internal lab.

Other Woodside hires include Mark Randall, who ran the supply chain at Amazon and was at Nokia; Vanessa Wittman, the former CFO of Marsh & McLennan; Scott Sullivan, the former head of HR at Visa and Nvidia; and Gary Briggs, the former Google VP of consumer marketing.

Google did not say it planned to make any layoffs, but did specify that quite a few of Motorola leaders are staying on in areas like product development and legal.

The deal was a surprise when announced eight months ago but has been a looming reality in recent weeks as the companies received the regulatory nod in one jurisdiction after another.

Motorola said in a regulatory filing Monday that it expects the deal to close by Wednesday, but it looks like it will be sooner than that. S&P’s stock index unit said Monday afternoon that it expects the deal to close before the start of regular trading on Tuesday morning. S&P needs to know these things, of course, because Motorola is part of the S&P 500, at least until Thursday when it will be replaced by Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Google was not immediately available for comment.

The deal’s closure was all but inevitable after Chinese antitrust authorities cleared it over the weekend. China was the last roadblock on Google’s eight-month road to regulatory approval, with the deal having already been approved by regulators in the European Union and the U.S. in February.

It’s a deal that has raised some hackles in the process, as Google could potentially play favorites with Motorola by giving early data on the Android operating system to Motorola, one of Google’s many licensed Android handset manufacturing partners. Ostensibly, companies like HTC, Samsung and LG could lose their competitive edge if Google were to give Moto the inside track.

But Google has vehemently denied any notions of favoritism since first announcing the acquisition, stressing that Motorola will continue to be run as a separate business.

That may be more likely after China’s blessing of the deal, considering that it was contingent upon Google keeping Android open to all partner manufacturers for the next five years. That’s especially helpful for Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE, both of which have placed big bets on Android.

At the initial acquisition announcement, Google said — and continues to maintain — that the buy was strictly a patent play, a move that in CEO Larry Page’s words would “enable [Google] to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”

Google, a Silicon Valley giant that built its business on Web services, startled the tech industry last August by saying it would buy the company, a much older, Illinois-based maker of mobile devices and other hardware.

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This patent dispute, one of several between the companies, centers on Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology. Ultimately, the ruling could lead to the ban of imports of Motorola products that infringe on the patent in question.

“Microsoft sued Motorola in the ITC only after Motorola chose to refuse Microsoft’s efforts to renew a patent license for well over a year,” Microsoft deputy general counsel David Howard said in a statement. “We’re pleased the full Commission agreed that Motorola has infringed Microsoft’s intellectual property, and we hope that now Motorola will be willing to join the vast majority of Android device makers selling phones in the U.S. by taking a license to our patents.”

The ITC issued an initial finding of infringement in this case back in December.

Motorola, for its part, notes that it can continue shipping products during a 60-day presidential review process and said it will ponder its options. It also noted that Microsoft had originally sought a ruling that Motorola had infringed on nine patents.

“Although we are disappointed by the Commission’s ruling that certain Motorola Mobility products violated one patent, we look forward to reading the full opinion to understand its reasoning,” Motorola said in a statement. “We will explore all options including appeal.”

Motorola said it will be required to post a 33-cents-per-unit bond for products it ships during the 60-day review period.

This dispute is separate from other conflicts between the two companies, including one related to Microsoft’s Xbox. Motorola has won an initial ruling it its favor from the ITC in that case.

There are a half-dozen flavors of the operating system, with products made by dozens of manufacturers and literally thousands of individual designs. Whether this is good or bad depends on one’s perspective.

But the sheer number of different products is mind-boggling. In a report this week, OpenSignalMaps looked at data from 600,000 users who downloaded its signal-measuring software. The company found that its software has been downloaded by nearly 4,000 different devices. Some of these are actually standard devices running custom software. But even factoring those out, there are still upward of 2,000 different Android products in the wild.

Of the nearly 600 different brands, Samsung rules the roost with nearly 40 percent market share, followed by HTC, SEMC, Motorola and LG. At the bottom end of the market-share battle, the company spotted a pair of the ill-fated Fusion Garage tablets and a handful of Polaroid’s smart cameras.

For its part, OpenSignalMaps notes the downsides of so many makes and models, but says that the opportunities outweigh the challenges.

“Developers tend to bemoan Android fragmentation yet there’s much here to be celebrated,” the company said in its report. “While the number of different models running Android will continue to increase we’ve seen Samsung take the lion’s share of the Android market, most of that due to the Galaxy product line. Testing on the most popular Samsung & HTC devices will get you a long way.”

Besides, Android means reaching to all corners of the globe. OpenSignalMaps says it has collected data from nearly 200 countries, with the most popular being the U.S., Brazil, China, Russia and Mexico.

“One of the joys of developing for Android is you have no idea who’ll end up using your app,” it said.

The report is chock full of interesting numbers and charts, and is well worth a read.

“I am convinced that the margins on mobile have to be higher than on desktop,” Pichette said today, speaking at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Technology Conference in San Francisco.

Factors like proximity targeting, local offers and mobile payments should make mobile ads in many categories more valuable, Pichette said. “The premise that mobile has to be a lower CPC [cost per click] because today it’s a lower CPC doesn’t make sense.”

Plus, Google got into mobile ahead of its competitors, Pichette claimed, citing its investment in Android. “We decided to go mobile five years ago, not last month,” he said — which could have been a reference to Facebook’s new mobile advertising plans, which only came out in February after it filed to go public.

Other topics that came up during the conference Q&A included Google’s pending Motorola acquisition — which Pichette said was about hardware, not just patents — and Android tablets — which Pichette said are “a very high focus area.”

“The court is well aware that it is being played as a pawn in a global industry-wide business negotiation,” Robart lamented after reserving judgment on the motions of Microsoft and Motorola for a later date. “The conduct of both Motorola and Microsoft has been driven by an attempt to secure commercial advantage, and to an outsider looking in, it has been arbitrary, it has been arrogant and frankly it appears to be based on hubris.”

Which, if you’ve been following these cases, is a reasonably accurate assessment. Using litigation to squeeze exorbitant licensing fees out of a rival for intellectual property is becoming par for the course in negotiations like those between Microsoft and Motorola, and as Robart points out, not only is that a drag, it’s often a waste of everyone else’s time.

A Microsoft spokesperson, however, said Motorola is prohibited from acting on the court’s decision because a U.S. court granted Microsoft a restraining order on April 11 to prevent Motorola Mobility from taking action based on the Mannheim court’s ruling.

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Motorola, which is awaiting approval to be bought by Google Inc. for $12.5 billion, sold 8.9 million smartphones, feature phones and tablet computers, down from 9.3 million.

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Of the two, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s last CEO, spent the most time on the witness stand. Called by lawyers for Google, he bolstered Google’s argument that it was free to use parts of Java as it assembled its Android mobile operating system.

Scott McNealy, called by Oracle, said it was Sun’s practice to let other companies use Java, but only with a commercial license, the primary requirement of which was that the licensee ensure that Java remain compatible.

While numerous other phones from the likes of Nokia, Research In Motion and Motorola were compatible with Java applications, those on Android weren’t. Compatibility is one of the main points over which Oracle has been arguing with Google. Oracle contends that not only did Google violate its patents and copyrights, but it then went on to build its own incompatible version of Java, fracturing one of the oldest premises of Java’s existence: Write once, run anywhere.

Schwartz said he had hoped that Google would take out a commercial license, but in the end, he said, according to a report on CNet News, Sun opted “to grit our teeth” and support it as part of the Java community. He said that he opted not to sue Google over the issue.

Oracle also presented as evidence an email from Schwartz, describing Google as having taken Java “without attribution or contribution,” and then went on: “This is why I love scroogle,” referring to a now-defunct Web-search service that served up Google-like search results anonymously. See it below.

The case is one of several pending between Microsoft and Motorola.

An administrative law judge held that Microsoft infringed on four Motorola patents, but that it did not infringe on one other.

The ruling is an initial determination, subject to review by the commission and to an appeals process. Microsoft expressed hope that it will ultimately prevail in the case.

“Today’s recommendation by the Administrative Law Judge is the first step in the process leading to the Commission’s final ruling,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We remain confident the Commission will ultimately rule in Microsoft’s favor in this case and that Motorola will be held to its promise to make its standard essential patents available on fair and reasonable terms.”

Microsoft has argued Motorola’s patent demands are excessive.

Motorola, meanwhile, said it was pleased with Monday’s ruling and said that it is Microsoft that is being the patent aggressor.

“Microsoft continues to infringe Motorola Mobility’s patent portfolio, and we remain confident in our position,” Motorola said in a statement. “This case was filed in response to Microsoft’s litigate-first patent attack strategy, and we look forward to the full commission’s ruling in August.”

In a statement, HTC said it had named former Goldman Sachs partner and onetime Motorola engineer Chia-Lin Chang as its new numbers executive, replacing Winston Yung. Yung, who has been with HTC since 2011, will remain with the company and will focus on corporate development, Chang said.

Following the move, shares of HTC fell as much as 6 percent in Taiwan, according to Reuters.

The company has had more than its fair share of issues in the last few months, after several quarters of impressive growth. The company said earlier this month that its most recent quarterly results showed sales off by more than a third.

Among the many, many cases out there are several between Microsoft and Motorola — a dispute that spans multiple continents.

Microsoft said on Wednesday that a federal judge has agreed that Motorola should not be able to stop Microsoft from shipping products in Germany until after the U.S. courts have decided whether Motorola lived up to its promise to license necessary patents fairly and reasonably. Redmond says Motorola hasn’t been playing nice in that regard, and has complained to the European Union. EU officials say they are considering taking action.

Wednesday’s ruling by the Seattle judge comes ahead of one expected next week from a judge in Mannheim, Germany.

“Motorola promised to make its patents available to Microsoft and other companies on fair and reasonable terms,” Microsoft deputy general counsel David Howard said in a statement. “Today’s ruling means Motorola can’t prevent Microsoft from selling products until the court decides whether Motorola has lived up to its promise.”

So, they got an injunction preventing Motorola from getting an injunction (or at least from enforcing any injunction they get.)

A Motorola representative also provided a statement: ”As a result of today’s hearing, Microsoft has committed to take a license under MMI’s patents essential to certain standards, in the event the court determines that Microsoft is entitled to a RAND-based license. Our focus from the outset has been to receive fair value for our intellectual property based on Microsoft’s use of (Motorola’s) patented technology.”

Microsoft is expected to have to post a $100 million bond in the case as part of Wednesday’s ruling.

Meanwhile, if you need something other than Microsoft v. Motorola to keep you busy, don’t forget the battles between Apple and Samsung, Apple and HTC and Oracle and Google, to name just some of the big cases out there.

Among respondents who plan to buy a smartphone in the next three months, 56 percent said they’ll purchase an iPhone. That’s two percentage points more than ChangeWave’s last survey, taken in December of 2011.

It’s also a better performance than all Apple’s rivals, save one. According to ChangeWave, interest in Samsung handsets held steady at 13 percent between both surveys. HTC’s also stayed flat at 3 percent. Meanwhile, Motorola fell by one point to 6 percent. And Research In Motion? The interest in the beleagured BlackBerry maker’s smartphones actually rose — from 2 percent to 3 percent.

Motorola represents one of the thorniest strategic and operational challenges in Google’s 14-year history. Oddly, few seem to be paying attention.

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The research firm estimates that just over half of the 104 million smartphones in America run Google’s operating system, up 17 percentage points from a year ago.

Ownership of iPhones continues to grow in the U.S. as well, representing 30 percent of the smartphone market — up 5 percentage points from a year ago.

Google and Apple’s gains have come at the expense of the other players in the market, which include Research In Motion at 13 percent and Microsoft at just under 4 percent share.

In terms of the overall market, including non-smartphones, Samsung is the top individual hardware maker, accounting for just over a quarter of the 234 million phones owned by those 13 and older. That’s essentially the same share it had a year ago.

Korea’s LG is next with 19.4 percent share, followed by Apple at 13.5 percent of total handsets, Motorola at 12.8 percent and HTC at 6.3 percent.

For the seventh consecutive time.

The iPhone scored 839 out of 1,000 possible points. That’s a point more than it claimed in J.D. Power’s September 2011 survey, and 41 points more than its nearest rival, HTC, which scored 798 (down from 801).

It’s also 64 points more than the industry average of 774, beneath which rivals Samsung, Motorola, LG, Research In Motion and Nokia continue to toil. All five of those companies’ smartphones fell in customer esteem, some precipitously. Motorola’s score slipped to 758, down from 775; Samsung’s to 769 from 777; LG’s to 733 from 760; RIM’s to 733 from 762; and Nokia’s to 702 from 721.

What a sad commentary on the industry that smartphones from five of its seven largest vendors posted below-average scores in customer satisfaction.

Declining scores.

Ease of operation, operating system, physical design and the all-important battery performance — which, according to J.D. Power’s study, consumers identified as the least satisfying aspect of smartphones, by far — are features you’d think the smartphone industry would have pretty much dialed in by now. But evidently there’s still lots of room for improvement.