Microsoft Makes an Astonishing $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties 304
mrspoonsi sends this report from Business Insider:
"Microsoft is generating $2 billion per year in revenue from Android patent royalties, says Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund in a new note on the company. He estimates that the Android revenue has a 95% margin, so it's pretty much all profit. This money, says Sherlund, helps Microsoft hide the fact that its mobile and Xbox groups are burning serious cash."
Re:Two billion bucks... (Score:5, Informative)
However the test used in the patent systems worldwide tends to be along the lines:
"to one skilled in the art".
i.e. if it's blindingly obvious to someone who does similar work all day long, professionally, every day, then it shouldn't actually be patentable at all.
Re:Gates was on the right track.. (Score:3, Informative)
Plus, physical consoles were pretty much always loss leaders... Sega, Sony, Nintendo would lose money on their hardware and make it up on selling titles - both their own and from third-party developers. Is Microsoft not including all of profits from licensing in their reports?
That's including all licensing fees, Live subscriptions, etc. The XBOX division as a whole is billions of dollars in the red.
Re:He estimates (Score:2, Informative)
XBox is Microsoft's doorway into the home. Companies have been fighting for decades to control the living room and there are no clear winners (Wii did well but didn't win). XBox can provide a unified system between TV, computer, and mobile device through Azure. When Microsoft does unification well there would be no need to use any non-Microsoft system.
There's also the importance of diversification. A company as big as Microsoft shouldn't have only one product.
Sherlund is blind if he can't see how Microsoft can use it or how the other consoles could eat away at Microsoft's other services.
Re:really? XBox? we sure about that? (Score:4, Informative)
It only has NetFlix support if you pay MS monthly. It's free on every other platform.
Re:They finally made money out of Linux. (Score:5, Informative)
I am not even going to argue with you about "innovations in computing", what with the best OS to date written by a Finn. How about this instead:
Empirically, the nation with the strongest army is also the nation that is responsible for most of the innovations in computing.
Empirically, the nation with the largest inmate population (both absolute and relative to population size) is also the nation that is responsible for most of the innovations in computing.
Empirically, the nation with the highest healthcare costs (both absolute and relative to GDP) is also the nation that is responsible for most of the innovations in computing.
Re:Gates was on the right track.. (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the intellectual property (basically just FAT licenses) actually came from the windows division. If you want your phone to plug into a windows machine you pay the short ugly looking character at the bridge.
Re:Gates was on the right track.. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm surprised phone manufacturers have not abandoned FAT. Since Android 4.0 devices have appeared as MTP storage devices to computers. MTP abstracts away the underlying filesystem so they could use EXT3 or pretty much anything they wanted to.
I suppose maybe there is a case for using FAT on SD cards, but many phones only use internal memory anyway. MTP is the only way it will ever be accessed.
Re:Gates was on the right track.. (Score:4, Informative)
They can't do that because Windows users will want to put the card in their PC to pull photos off.
But, there isn't any reason a proper ext3 or ext4 driver couldn't be ported to Windows. http://www.howtoforge.com/access-linux-partitions-from-windows [howtoforge.com]