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Microsoft Patents Grouped Taskbar Buttons
I_am_Rambi writes "According to the US Patent office, patent #6,756,999 belongs to Microsoft. The patent this time is grouping taskbar icons processes. This is included in Windows XP, and some prior art in X. Looks like it was accepted two days ago."
THERE IS prior art.
BeOS' Tracker had that in 1999 before anyone else. All windows/instances from the same application are showing grouped in the BeOS Deskbar, under the same sub-menu.
It seems the big difference is in the 'time threshold' part:
"The system organizes like application files and clusters the corresponding taskbar buttons and, upon reaching a threshold limit, creates and displays a group button that contains the like application files and removes the like taskbar buttons from the taskbar. Further, upon reaching a second threshold limit, the system ungroups the application taskbar buttons, displays them on the taskbar and removes the group button from the taskbar."
Big difference? Probably not, but enough for it to be 'new'...
While there is probably prior art for this, you have to realize that the issue date in not what determines if the prior art is relevant. It is the invention date or original filing date, which in this case was back in April 2000.
BeOS. Since 1998, and probably much earlier.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
"What is the average time to get a patent approved,"
... they often take 2 years to examine your invention on the merits.
It mostly depends on the field of art. Because there has been a huge boom in computer patents, there is a backlog in that department
Once the patent is examined on the merits, the examiner often makes rejections, to which the applicant answers with arguments/ammendments, and that may repreat several times, until the examiner agrees on a version of the application that is patentable. That part may take several years as well.
Three years is not really a long time to get a patent. I have seen some patents that have been languishing for 5 years. And sometimes the delay is not due to the PTO, rather it is the applicant's fault.
XP's release date has nothing to do with it. You need to find a system than had it in use no later than April 1999, one year before the filing date, to be sure of prior art.
The regulations are that prior art disqualifies a patent if and only if it was in use or on sale or had a description published before the latter of the invention date (which might be hard to prove) or one year before the filing for the patent. (35 USC 102.) Because we are not sure of the invention date, we need to go off of the one year previous rule.
You don't "file a case" to defeat a patent. You release a product that uses the patented work, and wait for them to come to you.
They didn't patent double clicking. Go read the patent.... they patented application buttons on PDA's (and similar devices) that performs different functions depending on how long the buttons are pressed, and how many times it's clicked within a specific amount of time. Whether or not they should've been granted that patent debatable, but simply saying that they've been granted a patent on double clicking is just wrong, and just plain silly.
Stephen Levy often plays fast and loose with the facts in order to make a more entertaining book (hence all the "hey cool" but impossible anecdotes in "Hackers").
The GUI was invented aways back in the 1960s. At first, it was just a cursor, but it was definitely driven by a puck with a button on it. There's you're mouse, years before PARC. PARC, which was a research center, by the way, not a product development center, created a graphical interface for performing actions featuring windows and icons. This was brought to the attention of Steve Jobs, who thought it was neat and traded several million dollars worth of Apple stock to Xerox in exchange for a "field trip" with his developers to PARC. Apple didn't license the technology per se -- there was nothing to license at that point, there was no product yet -- but they also didn't use Xerox's idea. They took the interface for performing actions and used the basic premise to create an interface for managing objects. They turned icons as verbs into icons as nouns, inventing in the process such things as the first Desktop, the first file management system (Finder) and the first graphical forms, controls and alerts (Xerox's interface was basically a CLI in a window with buttons).
Microsoft's "patent for double clicking" pertains only to hardware buttons on palm sized devices, and only to the specific use of timed accesses. Sounds like double clicking, but it isn't -- the patent is on using one hardware button on a handheld to perform three distinct actions using three distinct input methods, not on any of the three methods. Want to avoid the patent? Make sure YOUR handheld device only uses two of the three methods. Of course, this doesn't make for quite so sensational an article as "OMG M$ Patentz dbl click," which is probably why you don't know about it. Or, like Mr. Levy, do you prefer spreading colorful and entertaining fictions so long as the outline is correct?
Hey freaks: now you're ju
To my certain knowledge, BeOS had 'task grouping' in version 4 which I beleive predates April 1999. Since I did not use BeOS before version 4, I do not know when it was introduced as a BeOS feature.
Then again, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
You never know...
Sorry.
DCMonkey
The problem everyone is hav ing here is that "obvious" doesn't mean "obivous". Sure, maybe it seems obvious to a user, but obvious in the context of patentability has a very specific definition:
From the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure, section 706.02(j):
"To establish a prima facie case of obviousness, three basic criteria must be met. First, there must be some suggestion or motivation, either in the references themselves or in the knowledge generally available to one of ordinary skill in the art, to modify the reference or to combine reference teachings. Second, there must be a reasonable expectation of success. Finally, the prior art reference (or references when combined) must teach or suggest all the claim limitations. The teaching or suggestion to make the claimed combination and the reasonable expectation of success must both be found in the prior art and not based on applicant's disclosure. In re Vaeck, 947 F.2d 488, 20 USPQ2d 1438 (Fed. Cir. 1991). See MPEP 2143 - 2143.03 for decisions pertinent to each of these criteria."
The basic notion is that there must be some prior art, or combination of prior art, that "teaches" EACH AND EVERY claim element in the later patent -- PLUS there has to be a "motivation" to combine them. Just because there is prior art, or because something seems "obvious" to a user, doesn't mean that it meets the LEGAL definition of "obvious" relevant to the USPTO.
Just thought I would mention that...
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
Of course I noticed the thread -- especially as the reference featured MY NAME in the first place!
:-) ;-)
Of course I was surprised to see that Microsoft seems to patent something that is closely built after my thoughts mentioned on the kde-look mailing list in 1999 already.
One of the problems with considering my thread as prior art is that unfortunately it was implemented by Matthias Elter some months later. It only turned out during implementation that task grouping only becomes interesting if
- the user doesn't use virtual desktops already (because he already organizes his tasks himself already)
- the tasks are only grouped after a certain thresholded is reached.
It doesn't take to be a genius to get that threshold idea because it's just the logical next step once you implement it but it seems that Microsoft actually implemented my idea before we did and therefore realized this tiny step before us.
Anyways it's interesting to see how Microsoft seems to monitor the KDE mailinglists since 1997.
E.g. I had the idea to create kpersonalizer which featured a dialog with a slider which you could easily use to configure the amount of eyecandy versus performance in KDE.
It was funny to see a very similar dialog in XP Betas two months later which contained almost the same wording in some places
So much for cross-polluting ideas between KDE and MS developers