Google shocked the world this week with news that it was acquiring Motorola Mobility, the mobile handset and infrastructure company that also owns one of the largest set-top box manufacturing businesses in the world. There’s no doubt that the traditional pay-TV set-top business has been languishing in recent years, punished by low margins, slowing growth of traditional pay-TV subscribers and the ever-growing threat of over-the-top. The future for Motorola set-tops, it would seem, is in some hybrid architectures that could leverage Google’s software, but there’s no doubt carriers will likely be slow to embrace Google TV given their historical distrust of Google and their glacier-like adoption of new technologies.