Motorola CEO Dr. Sanjay K. Jha made one thing unflinchingly clear during yesterday's keynote at GigaOm's Mobilize 09 conference: the Cliq is all about Motorola--not Google and certainly not T-Mobile. The focus on the company no doubt stemmed to some degree out of its recent economic woes--the event was something of a make-or-break for Motorola, which, as of late, has been struggling to recapture the success of mid-00 devices like the Razr. On the software side, the event marked the latest in an on-going shift in focus for Android handsets away from Google.

Launched in October of last year, the first Android handset was all about Google--the "G" in T-Mobile G1. The device was branded with Google's logo and the name HTC was dropped entirely from the device for its US launch. The branding was actually part of a marketing deal with Google that insured the software giant would have a good deal of control over the version Android included on the handset, which meant that it was centered around such Google products as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, and YouTube.

The focus shifted away from Google a touch with the launch of subsequent handsets from HTC, the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the HTC Hero. From the talk surrounding both devices, however, it was clear that there was still some emphasis on the OS--in fact, in the UK, the latter is sometimes called the T-Mobile G2.

With yesterday's Cliq announcement, things went even further. Motorola spent plenty of time talking up the handset's OS, sure, but the company almost exclusively referred to the software as "MotoBlur," the name given to the company's social network-focused skin for the OS. Any emphasis on Android seemed like something of an afterthought.

For Motorola, the OS--which is set to be deployed on a number of upcoming handsets from the company (including, likely, the first Android phone for Verizon)--is not much of a selling point. For the G1, the first handset to utilize the brand new open OS, Android was the selling point. There was a tremendous amount of buzz surrounding Google's first entry into the mobile space, and as such, it only made sense to market the device as, essentially, a Google phone.

In the case of the Cliq, Android is more of a foundation, a building block on top of which Motorola could realize the vision it has for a new handset. Sure there's still a good amount of Google and Google services in there, but many of them are underneath MotoBlur, where the true focus is sites like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

So, with its name effectively off of the device, what precisely does Google get out of the deal? For the software company, it seems that being the foundation is enough. The company gets to deploy its services on any number of handsets without effort--therein lies much of the appeal of creating a piece of open-source software. It can evolve freely without you having to pump all of your resources into it. Handset manufacturers are able to tweak it to meet their own vision, while maintaining the services that Google is focused on.

Of course Motorola is hardly the be all, end all of Android marketing. As more companies continue to release handsets built around the OS, we may see more models that push the Google angle. On a whole, however, the operating system has been released into the world, and companies will mold it to meet their own images. And Google, for one, seemingly wouldn't have it any other way.