That’s how it works. Do you really believe that CEOs have the time to think up statements?

I thought this was common knowledge by now. The PR people write it, CEOs only give their ok.

Edit: All the statements being so similar is a testament to very shoddy PR work but it’s not all that surprising. The same PR people (well, very likely a single person) from Google who wanted to get statements from the all presidents and CEOs just called up the PR departments of all the companies and asked for statements, suggesting, along the way, the language: “Hi, this is Michael from Google. As you know we will very soon acquire Motorola and it would be very nice if we could get a short one sentence statement from your CEO about that, you know, to show your and our shareholders and customers how committed we are to the Android ecosystem. I can send you an email with an example statement to give you an idea about the length. Would that be alright?”

Yeah, my point was just that the statements clearly came from a common source (Google) not surprise that CEOs were not speaking with their own voices. The effect is that the statements do not appear at all sincere. They sound like they made these statements with Google twisting their arm, which has the opposite of the intended effect.

I'd doubt there was even that much involvement from the other companies - more along the lines of "We'd like to involve the following quote from your boss as a third-party validator in our release. OK?" And then their corporate PR says OK, because they haven't see the other ones, and it goes in the package.

This is how large-scale communications works - you write your message, come up with quotes that support your message, get them OK'ed by stakeholders, and send them out. If you ever see a media release that doesn't come from a speech, and it includes quotes from anyone, you can bet they never actually said those things - someone from PR wrote them, and got them OKed to have been considered said.

Put it another way, the first time the CEOs quoted ever saw what they "said" was probably when they read this page

That’s certainly also possible. I was just thinking there was more involvement because I have a really hard time imagining that some PR person at Google was writing one statement after another and didn’t notice how odd they would sound if you put them together on a page. Noticing stuff like that is something PR people are supposed to be good at.

That’s why I was thinking that Google gave them some talking points and they got oddly similar sounding statements back and didn’t really bother changing them afterwards.

Google PR should've done a better job of giving each OEM a different and longer quote. Cmon, is it that hard? The quotes when put next to each other, look like a joke.

Having been quoted in press releases before, I can say that it often works that way: the PR droids will send something saying "we quoted you saying this, is that OK with you?" It's weird.

I have to agree with this. Looking at those statements side by side it's as if they were given an assignment with 8 key words to choose from and given 5 minutes to work up a sentence.