SlashGear

If you’ve been watching Google over the past few months (or years if you watched closely), you’ve been seeing them move closer and closer to a fully armed and operational battle station made to take on the smartphone universe top to bottom. What we’ve just seen this evening here in the USA is a trade (though they call it a sale) between Google and the broadband media technology company known as Arris with “Motorola Home” being given to Arris in exchange for $300 million in Arris shares and a seemingly much more significant monetary lump sum ($2.05 billion) – but hear this: Google will own about 15.7% of Arris at the close of this transaction: this could potentially be much more important than the TV Set-top business they’ve just sold.

Google will eventually have a business model where you, the consumer, will pay them for the smartphone and the data it uses, owning the hardware and the software in-between as well. It’s only a matter of time. With the move Google has made today, they’ve made it abundantly clear that they’re all-in with mobile even if they don’t want to be the one-stop-shop. With a dropping of the business they’ve just exchanged with Arris, the most significant non-mobile portion of Motorola they acquired earlier this year will be gone.

In its place will be a stake in a company that works with a wide variety of broadband technologies. Google has seen clearly a future in which the way we watch and engage with media will not be a singular box that sits near a device called a television. Instead we’ll be working with a wide variety of displays that connect to displays – controllers that work with controllers, and touchscreens for all!

Of course thats a wild dream for a future in which there are no Google Nexus Q devices, but judging by the wide range of devices that exist in the Arris portfolio, Google just traded a passing fad for a wide open internet-connected book of possibilities. Stay tuned to SlashGear as we continue to investigate what exactly Google attained here and what it means for their future mobile business – and their command of the home, as well.

[via Arris]