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:Gates was on the right track.. (Score:2, Interesting)
says Sherlund, helps Microsoft hide the fact that its mobile and Xbox groups are burning serious cash
If you exclude Halo 2 and 3. Also if you dig into the financials of the xbox you will see a serious money sink. I got 3 prospectuses from them. I thought I had to be reading it wrong. No they were really spending that kind of money with a massive no ROI. I sold my stock.
Dont get me wrong. XBOX is wildly popular. But profitable? Not so much.
Having not see a recent prospectus I can just imagine the bleed on the phone division. Though that division did come up with many of those patents. And before everyone goes 'they are so obvious'. MS did something you didnt they made a patent out of it. The had been working on the smart phone since about 1998. They unfortunately came up with WinCE to show for it.
Re:Value added? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's only potentially true when the patents are disclosed. It's fashionable to not disclose what the specific patents argued to be infringed actually are (or the mechanics of how they're infringed) when trying to license a portfolio.
Can't work around a patent when you don't know what it is.
Re:really? XBox? we sure about that? (Score:5, Interesting)
common misconception. basic laws not patentable (Score:5, Interesting)
> software is math
Games are art, and are software.
Most games are 95% art, 5% math, and 100% software.
Math CAN be done as software, but so can art and many other non-math things. Some software is math. A LOT of software has little to do with math.
> math isn't supposed to be patentable.
That's a common misconception, started and encouraged by people with a particular agenda. The rule in the US is:
The LAWS of nature, including mathematics, are not patentable.
Note that it's the basic laws that aren't patentable. Things that USE those laws are.
Gravity isn't patentable. An elevator is.
Momentum isn't patentable. A brake system is.
Division isn't patentable. eBay's feedback system is.
Light reflection isn't patentable. The way Blender simulates reflection is, if it's novel.
patent vs copyright (Score:5, Interesting)
Technically it's only the implementation of an idea that is supposed to be patentable. With physical patents if you can accomplish the same thing by other means then it's fair game.
Somehow in software they've decided to allow patenting the *idea* of momentum when scrolling via swiping, or bounceback when you hit the end.
The equivalent to patenting physical implementations would be to allow protection of their *implementation* of an idea--and in the software world that implementation is already protected by copyright, so there's really no need for software patents.
Re:Two billion bucks... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have never understood this. Windows users are used to installing drivers for each new piece of hardware. Why not bundle an ext4 driver? The device could even have a small FAT partiton (without the patented parts of FAT) that contains the driver for the larger ext4 partition.
Manufacturers have allowed the situation to exist.
Re:Patents - Copyright for the 21st Century (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh don't worry, that will be the next war. If you thought the copyright war was fierce, wait 'til companies who sell some plastic junk for big bucks because their name is printed to one side or because the part breaks easily and may only be made by the original maker get to feel the loss when people notice that for the price that part costs they could as well buy a 3D printer and be independent from them forever.
Wait until their business model of vendor lock-in no longer works.
There are entire companies (and I'm not talking about mom'n'pop shops) dependent on that very model of selling appliances dirt cheap and making money with the spare parts and the consumables. And printer manufacturers are the least of your concern in this matter. You're about to see the battle between people with 3D printers vs. the car industry and its associated industries.
And this will be very, very ugly. If you thought the MAFIAA had ties in politics, wait 'til this turd hits the spinning blades. This time a LOT of jobs are on the line, and I'd be very surprised if that one goes down with a breeze. Expect some legal shit to come down that makes the whole copyright legal bull seem legit, sane and balanced.
Re:Gates was on the right track.. (Score:5, Interesting)
This gets to an odd contradiction right in the summary: the mobile division is "burning serious cash," yet also making $2B which is "pretty much all profit." It's as if the author sees no connection between investing in a business unit to generate intellectual property, and subsequently profiting from that investment.
Re:Two billion bucks... (Score:4, Interesting)
For some reason filesystem drivers (be they physical, usb, network, etc) appear to be VERY hard to write for windows. I have yet to see a 3rd party filesystem driver for windows that wasn't either broken or unstable. This includes NFS, EXT, even encrypted volumes. The best we've been able to get in most cases is a 3rd party file manager that can read/write the partitions, almost none of them work with the default file browser.