Microsoft Patent Envisions Free Computing

Dotnaught writes "A Microsoft patent application published on Thursday shows the company contemplating free computers and software for its customers. It suggests 'a service provider such as a telephone company, an Internet service provider, or a leasing company may provide computer systems or components to users at a reduced charge or for free in exchange for targeted advertising delivery.'"

Comments

Prior Art

[femtoguy]

I seem to remember about a zillion companies in the 90s that did this. A good example is PeoplePC. Does this patent things have no sanity.

hello?

[gmack]

Hey microsoft it's the year 2000 calling.. they want their buisness plan back.

Seriously. Wasn't exactly this done already? How can they patent this?

Yeah, right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Patents are never filed because someone plans on doing something.

they're filed because someone wants to stop someone from doing something else. this is the case here. I hope it doesn't get accepted.

Didn't we have this already?

[YrWrstNtmr]

CompuServ + Circuit City. PeoplePC. Altavista. Walmart.
Free hardware and/or online access.

Didn't work too well last time, either. Once you let the marketing guys fingers into it, they screw it up, by pushing too much.

Re:They tried this already

[nine-times]

Actually, I like everything about this idea except for the words "targeted" and "advertising".

Seriously, if the offer is that someone can data-mine everything on my PC and send me lots of pop-ups, spam, and flash banners, then no thanks. If computers are really cheap enough to make this business model viable, then I'd just as soon buy the really extra-cheap computer myself anyway (if it's cheap, why not?), which means the business model still wouldn't be viable.

This is not MS's plan

[jeffsenter]

My guess is Microsoft is just patenting vague advertising-revenue stuff to block others from patenting it. This does not mean Microsoft actually plans to move to advertising instead of paying for software.

Not so fast...

[rackhamh]

Every time a patent is mentioned on Slashdot, the same misunderstandings crop up over and over and over...

1. This is not a PATENT. It's a patent application PUBLICATION... which means the application has filed, but hasn't been examined yet (and probably won't be for about 2 more years).
2. Just because a patent is filed doesn't mean it will be granted.
3. The substance of the patent is in the claims. This is what Microsoft thinks (or wants the USPTO to think) is patentably novel. Specifically, what they're claiming is:

A computer-readable medium having computer-executable modules for execution on a client computer in association with advertising delivery comprising:
an opt-in module, comprising support for selecting an advertising delivery mode;
a user profiling module for collecting user profile data;
and an advertising delivery module for presenting a targeted advertisement corresponding to information in the user profile data according to the selected advertising delivery mode.

This is what the USPTO will be looking at when they do their prior art search.

Re:Not so fast...

[intrico]

Rather than misunderstanding like you say, I think most people on here are smart enough see through the smoke of the grossly-obfuscated language used in most of these patents. With the recent patent news, I think most people by now are aware of items #1 and #2 that you mention. But then we get to item #3, which is where the problem lies. If you understand technology and/or are highly literate, as is the case for most Slashdot readers, you can read the claims for many of these patents, see through the obfuscatory smoke, and realize that what they describe is either something that is blatantly obvious and/or something that has been done before.

For example, the portion of Microsoft's claims that you included above can be summarized as follows:
A program that runs on a customer's PC, letting the customer opt-in and select how they want their ads delivered, stores information about the customer, and then delivers the ads according to what information has been collected from the customer.

Just the fact that these companies would even dare to apply for things like that should naturally be enough to set off alarms. So I believe most people do in fact understand quite well what is going on.

Doesn't anyone read the newspaper?

[swordgeek]

How much did your Sunday paper cost you? Maybe a buck, these days. It probably cost the publisher about $3 to print it, factoring in all of the news gathering and publishing costs. However, they also sold about $5/paper in ads, so they're making a net profit.

Advertising is the primary revenue generator for information content providers. TVs, websites, newspapers, radio, and now computers. The only real difference is that once you get the computer, you have the computer and can theoretically do what you want. Of course, you could do that with a newspaper as well, by ripping the ads out.