Well that's quite a first day, and it's not even lunchtime in Silicon Valley. Larry Page just spend $900 million to buy patents from Nortel on his first day as Google CEO.
Considering how litigious Silicon Valley seems to have gotten lately, millions spent on patents you may or may not need is millions saved on lawyers defending lawsuits. And Google has the cash to spend. What it doesn't have is a lot of patents. It's not even in the top 50 companies as far as total patents.
Page has made acquisitions before, even before he was CEO. "One day Larry and Sergey bought Android, and I didn’t even notice" then Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the website Business Insider. Android turned out to be one of the cagiest of purchases, putting Google in the race for mobile.
Executives within the Googleplex have always considered Page to be a go-to decision maker. Amit Singhal, in charge of Google's search engine algorithm, said on a recent episode of Press:Here "when I had an emergency, I talked to either [founder] Sergey [Brin] or Larry. We worked with Larry and Sergey for so many years, they were the ones who wrote the engine to begin with."
