Yesterday, news spread of Google suffering from a rare mistake by releasing its 3rd Quarter financial statement early (prior to the market close).  A mistake that ended up costing the company $18 Billion. Well by day’s end, Google held its earnings call nevertheless and revealed some solid info on their relationship with Motorola and want consumers should expect as we enter into the new year.

Android fans have certainly been waiting for the Motorola acquisition to bear the fruit since Google acquired the mobile company earlier this year. Unfortunately, the relationship between these two is still in its infancy and as of yet hasn’t produced any new improved devices many had hoped for.

There are several factors as to why this process takes so long and why the devices being released by Motorola are no different than if the company was still its own separate entity. A hardware manufacturer like Motorola has a product pipeline that you simply cannot just cancel. This pipeline has a cycle of around 12-18 months so Google is certainly allowing this to play out before jumping in. It does take time and R&D to conjure new concepts and devices as well. Typically this process could be 6+ months long.  That currently would mean that Motorola is currently working on phones/tablets that Google will have a major influence on.

During yesterday’s earnings call, Google’s CFO Patrick Pichette stated that:

“We’re really pleased with Motorola’s progress in its first 150 days. As indicated in our public filings, our team has made a lot of operational changes, we harmonized and narrowed the product portfolio, [undertook] streamlining of software operations, and we scaled back the markets in which we operate. But that said, we’re just at the beginning of the Motorola-Google story, and we should expect, as I mentioned before, results from this segment to be quite variable for quite a while yet.

Remember that we inherited an entire product pipeline where hardware business cycles are typically 12 to 18 months.”

Ultimately this means if we are going to have Motorola devices (perhaps with vanilla Android and Nexus like support), we may have to wait until late 2013 when the existing product pipeline clears out. Certainly earlier reports have suggested that carrier Verizon has been objecting to Motorola not including it’s own OS overlay, however, that could change by late next year.