Please help me to understand the meaning of below mentioned sentences.

Please help me to understand the meaning of below mentioned sentences.

  1. Google may not have had much of a choice when it came to buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.

  2. If it didn’t, someone else would have and that would have put the company in an even bigger patent hole.

  1. Google probably had no other choice but to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.
  2. If it didn’t (buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion), then someone else would have bought it, and that would have put Google in an even bigger patent hole.

To add to what Tort said, the phrase “even bigger patent hole” relates to the fact that Motorola owns a vast number of patents. If Google hadn’t bought Motorola (and their patents) then the likelihood is that someone else (Microsoft) would have bought it and then they would have had control of the patents. Google wanted those patents as much as they wanted Motorola!