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There is a middle ground in Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility that is not just about just patents. It is not all about Google controlling its own original equipment manufacturer. Nor is it about solely defending the future of the Android ecosystem. This is about Google's standing in the mobile industry, the greater technology environment and its bottom line.

Google had very healthy second quarter earnings. Yet, it missed Wall Street expectations and the stock has taken a hit. Advertising accounted for 96% of Google's revenues, with near 66% of that on Google's own sites. Overall, Google's revenues were $6.82 billion. Google's investment in Android "is not material to the company" meaning that Google spends little on Android yet gets a decent return on its investment. Yet, there is a powder keg of money under Android and Google is seeing next to none of it in proportion to the ecosystem. So, Google needs to protect the future of Android for the value of mobile search it can advertise against. There are untold billions that Google could tap if it was more vertically integrated. Enter Motorola.

Editor's note: This morning news broke that Google has acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. The move is a fork for Google in that it is getting into the device business on a large scale for the first time in its history. The big discussion surrounds the fact that part of Google's acquisition of Motorola is to "defend Android" from patent lawsuits from the likes of Microsoft, Apple and others. Motorola has 17,000 mobile patents with another 7,500 pending. Google hopes to use those patents to protect Android and the entire ecosystem, including other Android original equipment manufacturers outside of Motorola, against attacks.

The transcript below provides the highlights from the conference call that Google and Motorola held this morning after the announcement. Questions from analysts and financial companies have been stripped so as to show the answers to pertinent issues from Google and Motorola.

Google and Motorola Mobility announced this morning that Google will acquire the mobile handset manufacturer for $12.5 billion. Android will remain open and Motorola will remain a licensee of Android. Google will run the Motorola as a separate business. Across the world, there are Android-based original equipment managers that feel like they just got punched in the stomach, as Google's entry into the hardware supply chain, no matter how benevolent the companies make it sound, is a huge wave that will have ripple affects across the entire mobile ecosystem.

It makes absolute sense for Google to buy Motorola. The last couple of weeks have seen Google take significant body blows to its Android vertical. First they lose the Nortel patents to Apple and Microsoft (among others) and then Apple comes out with its second quarter earnings statement to reveal that it now has $76 billion in the bank and making more than $10 billion in profit every quarter. Most of that is from iOS. Android is not making that kind of money for Google and the search giant has to be feeling that it missed an opportunity, especially considering that Apple only has 18.2% of the worldwide smartphone market and Android has 43.4%. How will Google's addition of Motorola shake up the industry?

Oracle continued its acquisition spree this week by snapping up Ksplice, a company that sells a zero downtime update technology for Linux. Ksplice enabled system administrators to apply updates and patches without rebooting or otherwise taking a server down.

According to the announcement, "Oracle believes it will be the only enterprise Linux provider that can offer zero downtime updates, and expects to make the Ksplice technology a standard feature of Oracle Linux Premier Support."

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Skype CEO Tony Bates took the stage this morning to go over some of the specifics behind Microsoft's $8.5 billion acquisition of the worldwide communications platform.

Reading between the lines of the talk there are a couple of things that become apparent for what Microsoft has planned for Skype. Foremost, Ballmer said Skype will continue to be a cross-platform service.

"I said it and I mean it. Microsoft will continue to support non-Microsoft platforms because it is fundamental to the value proposition of communications," Ballmer said. "We are one of the few companies that has a track record of doing this. Take a look at the work we have done over the years with Office, for example, for the Mac ... we have a track record of understanding our customers and the need to support our customers as they want to travel."

Research In Motion is continuing its "development by acquisition" strategy as it announced today that the company has acquired calendar and scheduling application Tungle.me.

The words "calendar" and "BlackBerry" have been together a lot recently. That is because RIM's new tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, shipped without a native calendar, contacts or email clients, all of which RIM has promised for "later this summer." There is no official word yet if RIM plans on integrating Tungle into the PlayBook but it would make a lot of sense.

Today sees another acquisition with Teradata's plan to purchase Aprimo, the marketing automation software as a service (SaaS). Teradata acquired Aprimo as a way to add more analytics and provide better business intelligence services.

Yesterday, Salesforce.com announced its acquisition of Etacts, the CRM startup for managing email contacts. That's the second acquisition this month for Salesforce.com, which announced its planned purchase of Heroku for $212 million at its Dreamforce event two weeks ago.

Facebook will double its pace of startup acquisitions next year and expects to acquire as many as 15 different companies in order to absorb new ideas and technology. That according to statements made by Michael Brown, corporate development manager at Facebook, at a seminar titled "Startup Exit Seminar: Early Stage M&A," in San Francisco last week.

Brown's statement was videotaped and reported on by Alastair Goldfisher of private equity blog PEHub this afternoon. We've embedded the key part of the video below.

While social news site Digg is struggling these days, quieter competitor Reddit is still going strong. Co-founder Steve Huffman, who sold the site for millions to publishing company Conde Nast four years ago this month, now says he wishes he still owned the site.

In an interview yesterday on the podcast Mixergy (which is highly recommended, by the way), Huffman told host Andrew Warner "I wish I still owned Reddit now". He recognizes, though, that the economic climate between now and then may have required the umbrella of Conde Nast in order for Reddit to have thrived. It's an interesting discussion about decisions, history and independence - for once regarding a startup that wasn't suffocated after acquisition.

In the world of the investing in and acquiring of companies, strategic investments sit on the fence between these two camps. When an established company sees a smaller one making progress in a field that it is interested in, it may make an investment in the company for one of several reasons. Doing so can give the company a bit of leverage in terms of helping steer the startup while not dropping a big acquisition investment. That said, it is important for startups to understand both sides of the coin before taking on strategic investors.