First cut is the deepest

Google's plans to slash 4,000 jobs is going to hurt

There is a kind of inevitability about the vendor acquisition process these days.

Big company buys struggling former giant, has a good old look at it for a while and then starts wielding the jobs axe, trimming the costs out of their latest purchase and leaving it looking decidedly leaner (and perhaps meaner? That remains to be seen).

This is certainly the case with Google and Motorola Mobility - after the $12.5bn acquisition closed in May this year - it has been action stations and the firing up of the management merry-go-round.

Chief executive Sanjay Jha was out, along with a number of other senior management figures and the various Motorola staff started to play the waiting game as their working future was decided behind closed doors.

Now the news today that it is set to cut 4,000 jobs - or around 20 per cent of Motorola Mobility's workforce.

Larry Page's 'welcome to the Google family' speech must seem a distant memory now.

Motorola - once one of the leaders in the mobile space (I had two of its phones - including the Razor - happy days!) - has been well and truly eclipsed by Research in Motion, Apple and Samsung (to name a few) - all of which left it standing as the smartphone and tablet race began.

It makes you wonder what on earth Google is going to do with the firm once all the cuts - two-thirds of which are outside the US - have been made.

I can't see it producing that much hardware - either smartphone or tablet related - that boat has already sailed, so it has (by brilliant means of conclusion) to be all about the software, and the IP Google acquired from the company.

It really is amazing to see the war in the phone market pan out - go back a few years and you never would have thought that Motorola and Nokia would be ousted by the smartphone upstarts, or that a Mac maker would be battling for the top spot with Samsung.

Of course, nobody dominates the market for ever, so there certainly isn't room for complacency on the part of the top dogs.

Google is not a company that takes being beaten lightly - so it will be interesting to see where it takes Motorola Mobility on the next phase of its development.