Before Oracle formulated plans to sue Google over Android Java code use, the company wanted to compete with Android in the smartphone realm. Unfortunately, things didn't pan out as Oracle expected, and the only other plan left was to bring Google to court.

Testifying in court, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison spoke of plans to buy a smartphone maker, namely Research in Motion (RIM) or Palm, but nothing went the way the company wanted. Ellison explained that he thought it was a good idea to enter the smartphone hardware business. Here is what he had to say about that:

"I had an idea that we could enter the smartphone business and compete with everyone in the smartphone business," Ellison testified under questioning from a Google lawyer. "It was an idea I wanted to explore. We explored it and decided it was a bad idea."

Bad idea because RIM was asking for too much when Oracle approached the dying BlackBerry maker, and then after Palm got eaten up by Hewlett-Packard (HP) for $1 billion, there was nothing else for Oracle to do but bow out and set its eyes on Google and its Android platform. Well, that is what the Google lawyer, Robert Van Nest, is trying to bring across to the court.

Van Nest applied a rocking blow to Ellison when he mentioned that Oracle CEO had very good things to say about Android back in 2009 at an on-staged appearance where he hailed his friends at Google for a job well done on the Android platform. All this was happening before the regulators approved Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems.

Question: is Oracle now trying to get money from Google because it failed in its own plans to enter the smartphone world, or is Google the one in the wrong? Let us know your thoughts.

(reported by Vamien McKalin, edited by Surojit Chatterjee)