Agreed. My observation is that patent shakedowns are the last resort of a market loser. Once your company starts losing vast amounts of marketshare to competitors, the patent warchest comes out.
IBM and Microsoft were notorious for this, as was AT&T. Microsoft has reformed recently.
The problem of course, is that Google isn't the market loser... yet. So while Google doesn't have a history of patent shakedowns yet, if we look at other tech companies that are past their prime, we can make a reasonable guess Google will eventually join the patent shakedown game.
