Sendo Accuses MS of Stealing Smartphone IP

Nate B. writes "According this article in The Inquirer, it seems that Sendo, a UK based development house, has filed suit in Texas as of December 23 to recoup monetary damages for IP it claims Microsoft stole. From the article, 'The company's grievance is that after years of working closely with Microsoft on the development of Windows Smartphone 2002, the fruits of their endeavours were handed straight over to HTC, which manufactures the SPV handset for Orange.' The story also includes this cute footnote, 'When Sendo announced it was to receive funding from Microsoft, I and some other British journalists asked Sendo's Hugh Brogan at the press briefing, in the London Waldorf, whether he wasn't afraid that the company might just take its information and then dump his firm. He claimed then there was no possibility of that.'" Seems there was more to this story than originally thought.

Comments

Officials commented...

[hermescom]

"We did get a little suspicious when MS representatives asked us to just hand over all of our research papers, but then Bill assured us that it was all going to be taken care of, and showed us the contract on his laptop asking us to click I Agree. The thing was so long and boring, and crammed into such a small window, that our lawyers just clicked "I agree" without really reading through the whole thing." Sendo Officials admitted early Thursday.

"We're still looking over the contract to see the ramifications of the "we owe you nothing" clause."

Microsoft officials declined to comment at press time.

How to learn from Microsoft

[bharlan]

Here's something I wrote in 1999 that still seems to apply.

If you are a monopoly, then everyone is a competitor. The key technology is the written contract, not software.

• Any contract worth signing must have a booby-trap for the other guys.
• Identify a hole in your market. Find a hungry company attempting to fill this hole, and let them have your exclusive endorsement for a few years. In return, they will sign a contract with a suicide clause. When you are ready to absorb this market into your own product line, you exploit the clause and they die.
• If new technology moves too fast, then you must form a strategic alliance. Find other competitors with no interest in the new technology and get them to sign contracts endorsing your incompatible, vapor-ware alternative. You kill the new technology and burn the other competitors at the same time.
• If a competing technology succeeds anyway, then remember that a monopoly has its privileges. Distribution channels must sell your weak products if they want the strong ones. Prevent the distribution of competing products. Such contracts are always confidential.
• Non-disclosure agreements are an end in themselves. Anyone who asks about your long-term plans is a potential threat. Get such parties to sign agreements not to discuss the issue with anyone else. Tell them how you will vaporize all competing technologies they may have considered. They can't check your story with anyone else. They can't complain if they base decisions on misinformation.

Amazingly, you can usually find companies to agree to these contracts for nothing. They'll sign just to be your friend.

Interesting

[Quill_28]

My company has had dealing with Microsoft, yet never had a sale. The reason:

We commonly sell source code to our customers but they usually are limited to a specific product family.

Everytime we deal with them they will not agree the code will turn up in other areas of microsoft, which we deem unacceptable and the deal is off. In our area, MS is not important so it's not a big deal.

I haven't read the article but i wonder how many times, others business "have" to deal with MS overlook things like the above, realize they have been screwed and then sue. Or get greedy for the MS deal, get screwed and then sue. Or maybe just plained got screwed by ole MS.

Or maybe it's all over my head and just business as usual. Yeah that's probably it.

Re:List of past cases?

[Otis_INF]

Err no. To enlighten you a bit:
Apple: Rip-off
Hardly. Xerox was ripped of by both MS and Apple (and others)

IBM: OS/2
It was a joined effort. MS has worked on OS/2 as well. No-one talks about the fact that IBM used MS' work when selling OS/2

Sendo: Rip-off
This is to be seen. If Sendo signed a contract MS could use the material, Sendo'll stay empty handed. And most of the time when it comes to a Company A sues company B because of IP theft it is basicly regret of company A that they've signed the wrong contract with B.

Sun: Java & C#
Come on... Both have C++ as their predecessor. If you say C# is based on Java, you then claim also that Java is the start of a new, unique path in the languages-tree. But that's not true. Java is based on C++, so C# is also based on C++.

Sybase: SQL Server
Also very wrong. MS and Sybase worked together on SQLServer, using a codebase provided by Sybase. However after 6.0 MS decided to part ways with Sybase, resulting in a 100% rewrite of SQLServer in v7.0.

Besides that, doing business with companies when IP is involved is a thing where you have to keep your IP attorney at hand for most of the time: nail everything off in tight contracts so no-one can fool you, steal your IP or rip you off in the long run. But what happens most of the time is this:

Company A, large big company, decides it's cheaper to work together with company B, small company with some intellectual property A wants. A does a proposal to B, which B rejects because it means B is selling the IP to A for a bargain. A then decides it is perhaps better to work it out in-house, so leaves B alone. B sees its targetmarket soon be transfered to the targetmarket of A, so decides to accept the offer of A. However, after a few years, B regrets this decision and wants to turn back the tables. No can do. Contracts are signed, B should have payed more attention. B can go to court, perhaps A will settle the case for some money to stop the bad press, but that will be all.

A isn't necessarily Microsoft. All big companies have this kind of cases regularly, especially companies who are in markets where having IP is having the advantage over your competitors.