Chinese Gov't Reveals Microsoft's Secret List of Android-Killer Patents 140
walterbyrd (182728) writes "A list of hundreds of patents that Microsoft believes entitle it to royalties over Android phones, and perhaps smartphones in general, has been published on a Chinese language website. The patents Microsoft plans to wield against Android describe a range of technologies. They include lots of technologies developed at Microsoft, as well as patents that Microsoft acquired by participating in the Rockstar Consortium, which spent $4.5 billion on patents that were auctioned off after the Nortel bankruptcy."
What happened the the prior article? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If generic and common behavior patents are... (Score:4, Interesting)
How long have Android phones been around? Long enough for this to apply, I'd expect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
Competition, Microsoft style (Score:5, Interesting)
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Now Microsoft is faced with a marketplace in which Windows no longer has a monopoly. Unfortunately, Microsoft never really learned how to innovate, so what is left?
Patent lawsuits, of course.
The once powerful Microsoft, a company that could kill off a start-up just by announcing an intent to compete with it, is now reduced to trying to maintain its power over the industry via legal bullying.
And the fact that Microsoft had to buy some (most?) of the patents to use in its bullying merely underscores the appearance that Microsoft still does not know how to innovate.
Re:If generic and common behavior patents are... (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole concept of a secret patent doesn't make sense, since the word itself means open or visible, as in "patently obvious".
Irony upon irony. We're getting this list from a Communist nation - and such places are supposed to be tight with information, thus making them inferior to the open society upon which freedom supposedly thrives. With a little help from the NSA.
Re:Competition, Microsoft style (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Apple is starting to be in the same boat. They had a coolness monopoly that many people used to make decisions based on a 'cool' factor rather than on usable features/functions. For instance, zooming on a web page was 'cool', even if it still wasn't practical to use the phone to view large numbers of web pages because of the small screen (pre-mobile web page world). My daughter snatched up on of the original iPhones right away, partly because she thought the zoom ability was cool. I stuck with my Android. Now, she has switched and vows never to go back.
After receiving an iPhone from work, it's amazing to me that anyone even buys them. It sits in my pocket, next to my S4, and is only used to view work email because of it's limited screen size, inferior built-in soft keyboards, and substandard/non-intuitive navigation features. (We are not allowed to install Touchdown and connect to the email servers, so they give us iPhones instead.)
Apple now thinks that getting into the 'connected' world is the way to go. They think that people will buy iPhones simply because of cool toys that can connect to bikes and golf clubs and such. It's kinda innovative, but like things all Apple, it's based on things other people are already doing. Just 'cooled up'. I wouldn't be surprised if they will own the patents and protocols and make it difficult for other companies to get in on it.
Meanwhile, Android will continue to be fragmented, which drives the ability for thousands of companies to complete and innovate.
Apple's only saving grace is their margin is so high they don't need market share.
They just need their iDrones to keep buying and drinking the Koolaid.
The innovation posts are amusing (Score:5, Interesting)
I find the innovation posts decrying the lack of innovation at Microsoft, Apple, etc. quite amusing.
Big companies have rarely been known for innovation, and often known for acquisition of the innovative. As far as I know, the sole exception is IBM at this point in time, though there was a time when HP did a lot of research and innovation as well.
But Apple has never been an innovator; they bought the ideas and companies that caught their interest and marketted them. The same with Microsoft. They bought DOS. They partnered with IBM on OS/2 leading to a lot of the technology behind Windows. They bought SQL Server from Sybase ASE (SQL Server is modified ASE 10.) I'm not even sure they coded Office instead of buying the pieces elsewhere.
"Innovation" in the minds of a lot of people is about bringing new products to market, not inventing technologies. And who is to say that researching something that never makes it to market isn't a waste of time and energy? What good did Nortel's patent portfolio do them in the face of incompetent and abusive management practices? They were the Canadian king of the telecom markets, right up there with AT&T, but management managed to kill them off. Yet one can't deny they invented a lot of key telecom technologies.
To sum up: Innovation is overrated. And in a world where it's "all been done before" such as IT, "innovation" is often no more than repackaging something that was done 20+ years ago that people forgot about.
Did Apple start the "patent bully" thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
Or is that just another idea that somebody else invented, but Apple perfected? Then Microsoft steals the idea from Apple?
In the early 1990s, Apple was suing everybody over this "look and feel" nonsense.
Apple has to be the ultimate patent trolling software company. Especially considering their patents are mostly over silly design issues that Apple did not even "invent."
But as horrible as Apple is, Microsoft comes close.
Re:For 1000s time, abolish all copyrights and pate (Score:5, Interesting)