How Joel Spolsky Shot Down a Microsoft Patent In 15 Minutes 175
Thornburg contributes news of a story spotted on Techmeme, writing: "[Joel Spolsky of] Joel On Software has a story about how he found and submitted prior art for a Microsoft patent listed on Ask Patents in 15 minutes. The patent was rejected based largely on the document he submitted." Spolsky gives a very readable introduction to the patent system, and software patents in particular; I especially like this part: "Software patent applications are of uniformly poor quality. They are remarkably easy to find prior art for. Ask Patents can be used to block them with very little work. And this kind of individual destruction of one software patent application at a time might start to make a dent in the mountain of bad patents getting granted. ... How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt."
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
I Welched on my bet and it led to a Mexican standoff with another guy who was an Indian giver. In the end we settled it with a game of Russian Roulette. It was chaos, a real Polish Parliament. In the end, the gun didn't go off and we all felt like we were Gypped.
Re:Mutually Assured Destruction (Score:4, Funny)
The irrelevance of who?
Re:Mutually Assured Destruction (Score:5, Funny)
I tried watching Dr. Whom once. Didn't much care for it.
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Funny)
I Welched on my bet and it led to a Mexican standoff with another guy who was an Indian giver. In the end we settled it with a game of Russian Roulette. It was chaos, a real Polish Parliament. In the end, the gun didn't go off and we all felt like we were Gypped and the Canadians were sorry about the whole mess even though they were not involved at all.
That whole post was Double-Dutch to me. As confusing as a game of Chinese whispers.
Re:Mutually Assured Destruction (Score:4, Funny)
Funny, even though the article says that Windows 95 was the peak for Microsoft, the same article says
PC sales were 59m units in 1995 and rose to over 350m in 2012
I'll be glad to take some of that failure off their hands.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Funny)