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IBM "Invents" 40-Minute Meetings

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the that's-a-great-idea dept.

theodp writes "On Thursday, the USPTO disclosed that self-described patent reform leader IBM wants a patent covering its System and Method for Enhancing Productivity. So what exactly have the four IBM inventors — including two Distinguished Engineers — come up with? In a nutshell, the invention consists of not permitting business meetings to be scheduled for a full hour during certain parts of the day. From the application: 'The observation is that if an hour were shorter, by a small amount, we would be more focused, and accomplish the same amount of work, but in less real time, thereby increasing productivity.'" I just knew someone would one up my 43-minute-meeting patent. That's why I've already begun intense R&D on my latest invention: the 37-minute meeting! Register early for an early-bird discount. Register even earlier for more of one.

37 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Mine Mine by nausea_malvarma · · Score: 2, Funny

    I call 41 minute meetings. Nobody can have a meeting for 41 minutes because I already invented that.

    1. Re:Mine Mine by Burkin · · Score: 2, Funny

      I patented the 41 minute and 1 second meeting. You better make sure not to infringe my patent!

    2. Re:Mine Mine by LaskoVortex · · Score: 5, Funny

      I patented the non-meeting. All group communication is now done by text messaging or twitter. Productivity jumped 140%.

      --
      Just callin' it like I see it.
    3. Re:Mine Mine by crispin_bollocks · · Score: 5, Insightful

      My company is all about the non-meeting. It's not all you'd hope for, believe me. In general, having an agenda (rare thing in most companies) and someone to step through it (rarer) without trying to solve the world's problems can make meetings a thing that employees can handle without dreading boredom. No chairs, lots of whiteboards, and each victim standing in front of his/her own section is tremendously productive :-)

    4. Re:Mine Mine by veganboyjosh · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, too much prior art, methinks.

    5. Re:Mine Mine by mysidia · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's fine. I'm already working on my patent for meetings lasting 39 minutes and 59 seconds, and also meetings lasting 40 minutes and 1 second.

      Plus meetings of durations 00:00 42:00 43:00 44:00 45:00 4*:00 5*:00 **:02 **:03 **:04 **:05 **:06 **:07 **:08 **:09 **:1* **:2* **:3* **:4* **:5* **:6* **:7* **:8* **:9* 0*:** 1*:** 2*:** 3*:**

      By the time i'm finished, the fine folks at IBM are going to have to use an atomic clock to time their meetings, in order to ensure compliance and non-infringement of my patents....

    6. Re:Mine Mine by rackserverdeals · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Don't despair, I think patents expire. We will look back at this time 200 years from now and wonder "what were we thinking!"

      Patents expire, but a lot of harm can be done until they do and IBM is no stranger to playing the patent extortion game.

      The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.

      After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.

      An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

      After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.

      IBM even tried to patent the patent protection racket.

      And whenever something about IBM and patents comes up someone giddy over how IBM fought SCO in court says something stupid like it's just a defensive patent. IBM has a long history of being offensive with patents.

      IBM set the standard for patent licensing in the early '90s. While Big Blue was in a steep decline, veteran employee and lawyer Marshall Phelps got the company to raise the fees it charged others for piggybacking on its ubiquitous technology. Phelps recalls that incoming CEO Lou Gerstner was skeptical of the program; at RJR Nabisco, he had been involved in a patent dispute with Procter & Gamble over soft chocolate-chip cookies. Phelps changed Gerstner's mind by cracking open an IBM PC and showing him all the components that came from other companies. In other words: hardware companies were interdependent, and as the biggest fish in the sea, IBM should exploit that fact. A few years, later IBM was raking in $2 billion a year of almost pure profit from licensing revenue.

      --
      Dual Opteron < $600
    7. Re:Mine Mine by houghi · · Score: 2, Funny

      I had almost the same idea. I just used facebook instead of text messaging and twitter. Productivity dropped by 140%.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  2. And The Loser Is... by alain94040 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The only way to fight this epidemy is for some geek group (slashdot, techcrunch, whoever) to hold an annual lemon patent award to the most stupid patents.

    Finally, engineers and companies may be scared of receiving this award, with the attached bad publicity, and may think twice before submitting blatently stupid patents.

    --
    can we do Libre without Free? FairSoftware

    1. Re:And The Loser Is... by nausea_malvarma · · Score: 5, Funny

      You're too late. I already patented lemon-patent awards.

    2. Re:And The Loser Is... by syzler · · Score: 5, Funny

      I thought the USPO already had a system like this in place and the award is called a patent.

  3. IBM Says by st3v · · Score: 2, Informative

    No! No, no, not 37! I said 40. Nobody's comin' up with 37. Who has a meeting in 37 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.

  4. Seems resonable by nixdroid · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm pretty sure that IBM invented meetings, so why not?

    --
    -- Consensus - 50% probability that the majority are wrong.
  5. Zero minute meeting by Virtex · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I generally prefer the 0 minute meetings. They're so short you don't even have to go. That way you can actually get real work done.

    --
    For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
  6. Bad summary by Dachannien · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Any Slashdot article that quotes from the abstract, background, or other parts of the disclosure of a patent application instead of the claims, which are the part of a patent application that actually counts, should automatically get tagged "badsummary".

    Oh, wait, that'd be all of them.

    1. Re:Bad summary by Zordak · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'm normally the first one up there with you saying all these rubes on /. are overreacting. But I read the claims, and they're actually WORSE than the summary. The first independent claim looks like "restricting meetings to a definite time." It doesn't even say 40 minutes. It's just a definite time restriction. Now granted, this claim won't be allowed, but ... wow.

      --

      Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
    2. Re:Bad summary by samkass · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, that's not what it says. By my reading, the patent is actually reasonably innovative. At least, I've never heard of any calendaring system doing it as described.

      What the claims of the patent say, in essence, is that the day should be broken down into schedule-able blocks of differing sizes configured by a system administrator. So if you have a 40 minute meeting, you can reserve the 40-minute block during that day and not the 30 or 60 minute block. Instead, most people today would say, "Well, it's going to run longer than 30 minutes, so I'll reserve an hour." I actually think I'd love it if Outlook operated in the way described in the patent instead of making it easiest to reserve meetings on 30 minute boundaries.

      --
      E pluribus unum
  7. Wall squats by kkrajewski · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Have a seat, gentlemen. Muahahahaha.

    Guaranteed your meetings will run no longer than 10 minutes max.

  8. Could IBM Engineers be trolling for Slashdotters? by djl4570 · · Score: 2, Funny

    I am incredulous at this patent. When you get to [49] you realize you've been reading bloviated shaggy dog joke. Could IBM have a few smartass Slashdotters working in Engineering? My last thought is some engineers in between projects needed to work on something and this was it.

  9. Bad assumptions by Peaker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The only way to fight this epidemy

    You have two problematic assumptions:

    1. You assume its the only way
    2. You assume its a way

    Frankly, your idea won't work, as nobody would care -- and I'd call it unimaginative to say there's no other way :-)

  10. Patent madness by JSG · · Score: 2, Interesting

    IIRC (IANAL) a patent can be (in a simplistic sense) granted for a business process but is invalidated if "prior art" can be demonstrated. I also believe that an "obvious" invention is invalidated as a patent.

    How on earth does this even get accepted for inspection?

    Does this story even need debating? Is it conceivable that the patent will be granted? (in the US or anywhere else). This last question I'd love to be answered by someone who is an expert in this sort of thing.

    1. Re:Patent madness by phantomfive · · Score: 2, Informative

      Have you looked at the patent application? See if you can look at it for more than 10 minutes without screaming out in pain and horror. Would you want to have to read those things every day eight hours a day as your job? I sure wouldn't. I would take a significant pay cut to work in some other place. They would have to pay me $200k before I would consider working at that job. So what kind of people do you think end up inspecting patents? I feel sorry for them. It's not a job that should be inflicted on anyone. They shouldn't even be given to Al Qaeda agents.

      Other than that, the patent is for more than just a 43 minute meeting. Of course that is too obvious. It is a vast patent, with an implementation that covers cell phone towers, HTTP, and references the 802.11 specification. And it's not easy reading: it would take hours to fully digest the whole thing.

      The main point of the patent is a template system that can be sent to everyone in your business, that will set the default size for meetings in your chosen calendaring application to something other than one hour. It is probably a new idea, but it is not something any other programmer looking at the problem wouldn't have come up with.

      --
      Qxe4
  11. Silly by eln · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Scheduling a meeting for 40 minutes is useless, because the meeting will just end up going overtime by 20 minutes most of the time. The secret to a quick yet productive meeting is to have a well-prepared, well-organized moderator who is able to get to the pertinent facts quickly and cut down on extraneous chatter.

    Unfortunately, those people tend to be rare, at least in my experience. I can have a meeting that runs 20 minutes, and another that runs 90 minutes, and the 20 minute one will be more productive because the leader of that meeting is able to stay organized and keep control over the conversation.

    If you schedule a lot of meetings back to back that are each 40 minutes, they may all end at 40 minutes as people start to leave to get to the next meeting, but without the aforementioned leadership, they'll just be 20 minutes less effective than the hour-long meetings you used to have were.

  12. time allotted vs. time productive by panthroman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why do people think meetings must fill the allotted time? The start time is when you meet. The "end" time is the limit, after which you're free to have other engagements. But if you get everything accomplished early, why babble away for the remaining minutes?

    You can't demand productivity. If you're not being productive anymore, meeting over.

    Does anyone have meetings that actually operate like that? Do they work?

  13. WTF?...Let's do the Time Warp again!!! by rts008 · · Score: 2, Funny

    'The observation is that if an hour were shorter, by a small amount, we would be more focused, and accomplish the same amount of work, but in less real time, thereby increasing productivity.'"

    [my emphasis]

    This could have only come from some PHB/MBA marketdroid.

    My bad! Maybe they are asking to be thrown into the event horizon of a black hole???

    We have sacrificed many things to achieve IP(Imaginary Property) as a viable 'business model', but trying to redefine physics to artificially 'manipulate' time is just too much for anyone with more than a shoe-size IQ!

    Or has Physical Sciences/Quantum Physics been redefined and subverted to become part of the MBA curriculum for PHB's?
    Solutions?
    In the time honored /. tradition, I propose:

    We need to exhume all of our deceased scientists, wrap them in wire, and re-bury them inside of a magnetic coil==end of 'free energy' problem.
    Damn, wrong format...correction:
    revised
    1. exhume and 'wire-wrap' all scientists, and re-bury inside of magnetic coil.
    2. connect 'wired scientists' to MBA curriclum
    3. ????
    4. Profit!!! with unlimited 'free energy!!!'

    This has to be the saddest thing I have seen in quite some time...for it to be entertainable enough to actually make it to the 'front page' of anywhere, including /., to link to it!

     

    --
    Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
  14. The Obvious... by pentalive · · Score: 4, Informative

    No one yet seems to have mentioned a 42 minute meeting as the perfect time. (for any time over 0, zero minutes is more perfect)

    1. Re:The Obvious... by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I prefer 42 nanoseconds.

  15. Re:prior art by DrLang21 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In all the places I've worked, meeting time allotments are only somewhat honored. For the most part, the meetings always take as long as they need to. About the only thing that can prevent a meeting from going into over time when not everything has been covered is when the group can't find a room to move to when they get kicked out by the next scheduled meeting.

    --
    I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
  16. What about 6 minute abs? by gnix.geo · · Score: 2, Funny

    No...not six, I said seven. No one's coming up with six. Who works out is six minutes? You won't even get your heart going, not even a mouse on a wheel. Sevens the key number here. Think about it. Seven doors. Seven-Eleven. Seven. Seven little chipmunks twirling on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' of gorgonzola when it's clearly bree time baby. Step into my office...cuz you're fuckin' fired!

  17. THE BEST way to fight this by linhares · · Score: 3, Funny

    is to expose by updating their wikipedia page, seriously, calmly, with proper references. That's what I'll be spending the next minutes on. See ya

    1. Re:THE BEST way to fight this by psxndc · · Score: 4, Informative

      Congratulations on proving why Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information. IBM does not have a patent on a 40 minute meeting, they have a patent application that claims setting up a time template on a scheduling server (claim 1) that allows for using different time intervals (claim 3). If you actually look at the file history on the USPTO site, you'll see the patent office hasn't even picked the case up to examine it yet. But that would assume people on slashdot care about things like facts.

      The article quoted says "wants a patent", not "has a patent." The Slashdot editor then implied IBM had a patent. And what you did, seriously, is spread FUD because you took something you read on slashdot (but clearly don't know anything about) and posted it to a place people read and rely on as an accurate source of information. Pat yourself on the back. You spread misinformation today.

      Informative my ass.

      --

      The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.

  18. Re:I'm gonna patent the.. by notseamus · · Score: 3, Funny

    How apt, considering your username

    --
    I dreamed of Freud: What does this mean?
  19. Meeting Moderators by elpostino · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Unfortunately, those people tend to be rare, at least in my experience.

    They are! I worked for a firm that did a lot of government engineering. Our meetings lasted a maximum of 42 minutes (we had to account for all of our time in 6 minute increments) and any meeting with more than two other people required a meeting moderator. Since we only had a couple of meeting moderators for 3000 engineers we had few, but very productive meetings.

  20. This is kinda ironic for IBM old timers by sprior · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When I first started at IBM the company accounted for employee time in 1/10 hour (6 min) increments, so the IBM way would be for 36 or 42 minute meetings, 40 minutes is unthinkable!

  21. For those that use q3a to test lan latency...... by djdavetrouble · · Score: 2, Insightful

    2:00 Meeting
    3:00 Meeting
    4:00 Meeting
    5:00 BEATING

    --
    music lover since 1969
  22. Can apply this thinking elsewhere by bakes · · Score: 2, Funny

    The same thinking can be applied elsewhere - the first thing that comes to mind is television shows. A full 1 hour show sees me either dozing off or losing interest. If they could shorten the show to... I dunno... maybe 43-46 minutes, I would find it much easier to pay attention all the way through.

    Sure, they would have to cut out some of the current content, but I'm sure these clever television people could find a way to make that work.

    --
    Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
  23. I've worked for IBM for almost 25 years. by jonatha · · Score: 3, Insightful

    My first meeting should be finished sometime today.

    --
    The SCO lawsuit makes me wish my company were in Utah. We need a new building.