Germany Rejects Microsoft FAT Patent

Askmum writes in with news that a German patent court has ruled Microsoft's patent on FAT invalid in that country, finding that it is "not based on inventive activity." Just one of 6,000-odd patents Microsoft has amassed since a 1991 memo from Bill Gates turned around the company's attitude to patents.

Comments

Why do I hate MSFT?

[Kadin2048]

It's entirely possible that if Google or Apple was in the position Microsoft is in, I'd hate them just as much as I do MS. In fact, it's highly probable. But they're not, so it's a bit of an academic point. I wasn't a big fan of IBM back in the early 90s, when they were the dominant player, and every once in a while I find it odd when I read some pro-OSS, pro-IBM article, because there's a part of me that still thinks that ought to be a contradiction.

But to be honest, what really gets to me about Microsoft isn't their overly aggressive business practices, it's the fact that they're boring. They have more money, more resources, than God, and yet they seem to constantly fail to innovate. That's what's really painful. Maybe being on the top isn't conducive to innovation, and if Apple or anybody else were up there, they'd be just as stagnant and dependent on buying and copying ideas from elsewhere, but I think part of it is just a function of Microsoft's culture and its leadership. I mean, you could say virtually the same thing about Bill Gates personally -- the man has enough money to practically reshape the world, but he seems mostly content to sit in his gigantic house and run his pet charity, which on the whole isn't particularly creative or innovative. It's just like every other charity ... just bigger. There's no vision there. Compare him to John D. Rockefeller, or any number of early-20th-century philanthropic industrialists, and the guy's just a total zero.

So that's what really gets me about Microsoft. It's not that they're evil; I could forgive them for that -- I respect evil. But they're mediocre and evil, and there's no excuse for that.