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Microsoft Sues Salesforce.com Over Patents
WrongSizeGlass writes "CNET is reporting that Microsoft is suing Salesforce.com in Seattle federal court, claiming it infringes on nine patents. Two of the patents in question are a 'system and method for providing and displaying a Web page having an embedded menu' and a 'method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display.'" Microsoft says it first notified Salesforce more than a year ago about the alleged infringement.
Looking for the MSFT agenda here. Are salesforce.com people going after microsoft sales reps? Has the saleforce.com people brought too much competition to MSFT? What gives?
The're just pissed that SalesForce is using FireFox in all there screen shots.
One angle I could see on this: Sure, everyone might want to make their webpages look this way. But if you rip off the exact code MS is using, change some variables, and get caught, well hey, looky here, we patented that beyotch.
Just a vague idea though.
Nah, that would be copyright infringement.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
I consider myself a pretty calm person. I don't get riled up about much. I've never been one to throw a game controller, to punch a pillow to vent frustration. I see stupid things and I don't like them, I talk about how stupid they are, but that's as far as it goes. I'm about as easy going as they come.
And yet every time I see a story about the activities supported by the US Patent and Trade Office, I want to lift the nearest piece of electronics and dash it against a distant wall.
Theoretically yes, look up "work product." Depending on how rigid the old company is you can just write it into the contract that you retain copyright of your scripts and they have perpetual and derivative use in any context, or vice-versa, or however you want to structure it.
As a practical matter, it's probably unlikely to come up due to the cost of a lawsuit. (Unless they're really valuable scripts or there's a lot of personal animosity.) Plus they have to find out about it.
There are also issues as to whether the new company will get sued, or just you. Either of you can, of course, but who winds up having to pay is a different question, which probably depends in part on whether the new company knows (or is willfully avoiding knowledge of, etc...) it is infringing, etc...
There are also a number of complexities you'd look into. Injunctions, whether any of these jobs are independent contractor jobs, etc...
Note that the case in the story is about patents, not copyrights. Also, none of this is reliable, but is an off-the-top-of-the-head thought. IANAL.
Once again a Slashdot patent story is posted with reference to the titles of the patents. Patent titles are legally meaningless. The patentee doesn't even have to supply one; the Patent Office will write one for you if you leave it out. What matters are the claims read in light of the specification.
Anyway, from the complaint, the patents in question are:
7,251,653
5,742,768
5,644,737
6,263,352
6,122,558
6,542,164
6,281,879
5,845,077 (the leading 5 was left off in the complaint, but this is the right patent)
5,941,947
The '768 patent was originally assigned to Silicon Graphics. It was one of several SGI patents assigned to Microsoft in 2002 as part of a $62.5 million deal.
Some of the patents are related. The '164 patent, for example, was the result of a continuation application based on the application that eventually became the '879 patent.
Anyone looking at these from a prior art perspective should bear in mind that the patents have quite early priority dates. Most of them seem to date from the mid-90s. The '164 and '879 patents, for example, stretch back to June 16, 1994.
First Apple turns patent troll on HTC, now it's MSFT's turn? I thought these two were kinda well behaved and used patents only as a defensive measure, guess I was wrong.
This space for rent.
I remember a few years back when Bill Gates said that Microsoft had been sued over patents, but never sued anyone else. They insisted that like IBM and other big companies, they had massive patent portfolios just to protect themselves. But then they sued TomTom over FAT patents and now this. What happened to Microsoft doesn't believe in suing over patents? Is this indicative of Gates handing the reigns over to Ballmer, the guy who threatened to sue anyone running Linux?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Guess I better go register to vote so I can hopefully get jury duty for this. lol
Be seeing you...
Microsoft, like most other companies, has indeed had it's share of "innovation", popular opinion not withstanding.
It's easy to find things that are "kind of like" a new invention, that can be said for every single product in existence. It's just fun to do it for Microsoft.
Can you name a single software invention by anyone else that was truly unique? Anyone? Bueler? I guarantee anything you name can find something that is "kind of like" something else. That's how invention works, and that's why patents always have a list of references to other patents which the new patent draws upon. Unfortunately, you can't list things that aren't previously patented.
A short list of things which Microsoft has innovated (off the top of my head, without even googling) in would include (whether you like the ideas or not)
The Ribbon
Photosynth
COM (originally OLE)
Internet Explorer Protected Mode
If you google around, you find lots of tongue in cheek and sarcastic comments, and comments like yours that say point blank that microsoft has never innovated anything. It's certainly true they've bought a lot of their technology, but not all of it and even when you consider technology they bought, they've often improved it with their own new technology (IE Protected Mode, for instance).
Also, Microsoft certainly has their share of bad technology they've implemented. ActiveX, for instance. Whether it's a good idea or not, it's still a novel idea (no, plug-ins weren't novel, but auto-installing them, and creating a generic model that could be used by more than just web browsers was).
So in reality, comments like your really are just hyperbole. It's simply not true that Microsoft has never created anything novel. Hell, Clippy anyone?
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Laugh all you want, but office has had a number of innovative ideas, whether you like them or not. Assistants (ie. the universally despised clippy), The Ribbon, OLE integration of different kinds of docuemnts within a single document, OLE Automation control (Yes, we all know about ARexx capable word processors on the Amiga, but that was really only a tiny fraction of the capabilities that OLE automation exposes).. hell, Word was the first word processor to provide live spell-checking with the red squigglies.. (again, whether you like it or not.. lots of people do like the feature, lots don't).
Don't you think it's just as dishonest to claim there is no innovation when there is, as claming more innovation than there is?
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Nope. No way have Microsoft ever applied common sense. You'll never make money from that patent.
The ribbon is one of the worst UI changes ever to a application. Most experianced Excel users find their productivity going down due to it.
Laugh all you want, but office has had a number of innovative ideas, whether you like them or not. Assistants (ie. the universally despised clippy),
in a word processor which they were not the original authors for, which was the first use of a piece of clipart for a function other word processors already had in help panes, status bars, tool tips or pop-ups... (wow, that's innovation... someone else's idea - with a piece of clipart)
The Ribbon
Which still confuses users of older versions of Office to this day by the way it can take what was a simple, easy to use interface and mangle it - and which other word processors did a long time ago in a better fashion by simply hiding and showing the appropriate toolbars for the task at hand...
OLE integration of different kinds of docuemnts within a single document
...which was an idea long since in existence in the Xerox Star systems...
OLE Automation control (Yes, we all know about ARexx capable word processors on the Amiga, but that was really only a tiny fraction of the capabilities that OLE automation exposes)
While on the other hand, REXX enabled word processors had even greater capabilities than OLE automation, as did various competitor products in the Windows and non-Windows marketplace marketplace... and even in the areas where OLE Automation shone, it also caused a bunch of security issues due to it's poor implementation with no thoughts of the consequences caused by it's design (but thats a topic for a different discussion).
.. hell, Word was the first word processor to provide live spell-checking with the red squigglies..
As long as you discount various TSRs for word processors as old as the DOS (non-Windows) age version of word processors, a variety of other implementations on non-PC systems, and the fact that Microsoft introduced it in Word 95, almost 20 years after a team for IBM came up with the concept and 8 years after Spellbound came out with that functionality you tout as having been a Microsoft innovation.
Other than those points, I guess you are right! Either that, or you bought into Microsoft's propaganda (errr... marketing, I mean).
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
I proved you wrong on a bunch of these above... but let's go at it again.
The Ribbon
Already covered in my last post - done better by others before. Or do you think the fact that they call it "The Ribbon" is the innovation part of mangling an idea others already had?
Photosynth
They funded a University of Washington project which became a MS Live Labs project. Their other related "innovations" were acquired by a company called SeaDragon and various others. So, even the ones that are innovative werent innovated by Microsoft.
COM (originally OLE)
Covered above... Xerox Star (and others) and for COM implementation (ie: more than just OLE), it was to catch up with IBM and OS/2, the Mac and numerous other non-PC based implementations.
Internet Explorer Protected Mode
Even if they were first, it doesnt count because it would actually have to work first. And there are already exploits that can bypass IE in protected mode on operating systems (Vista onwards) that support it. That aside, various programs did this far better than Microsoft's implementation before Microsoft licensed various technologies for it and wrote the rest. One such is a package from a big software firewall company (I'll give you a hint...ZA). That aside, Chrome manages it better than IE and Vista/Win7 - even without all the added work that Microsoft did to Windows itself to enable this feature in IE.
So... where were we? Oh yeah... I remember. Microsoft MAY have innovated something, but you cant think of anything. Well, here's one. Edlin.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
You show a fundamental lack of knowledge of what you're actually talking about. Assistants weren't simply animated ways to access help text, they could actually analyze what you're doing and supply recommendations. That was innovative. Annoying, but innovative.
What part of "Whether you like the idea or not" don't you understand? You or anyone else liking the idea has no bearing on its novelty.
You don't do your argument any justice by making fallacial comments like this.
The star had document embedding, but it wasn't live document embedding. You couldn't edit documents in place, and you couldn't update the document elsewhere and have it be updated in the embedded document.
Don't confuse "Someone once did something kind of like that" with lack of novelty. It's not just the base concept, it's the entire concept.
That's interesting, sicne I can find no reference to any word processor called Spellbound... And the only reference to a spell checker is the firefox extension, which certainly did not come out 8 years before Word 95.
I'm also suspect of your IBM reference, given that you seem to conflate way too many concepts to believe your arguments. Do you have a reference?
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Saying it does not prove it. Show me the prior art. Bear in mind that merely being a tabbed toolbar doesn't make it the same thing. The Ribbon's functionality is what makes it innovative, not the fact that it has tabs.
Regarding Photosynth, All new ideas are based on research of others. Newton said something about standing on the shoulders of giants, doesn't make his work any less innovative. Photosynth, as a product, was highly innovative.
Are you fucking kidding me? OS/2 was created by Microsoft and IBM together. Microosft wrote nearly all of OS/2 up until OS/2 1.3, and COM and OLE goes back to 1987, the same year OS/2 was released *WITHOUT A GUI OF ANY KIND*.
Wow, you are ignorant of history. Wow, that's just plain stupid.
And Xeros Star had nothing like COM or OLE. It's object embedding technolgy was entirely different.
Now you're just being stupid. Of course it works. Just because it can't protect from every possible exploit doesn't make it useless or "non working". By that argument, just because someone can root a unix box, that means all of it's security doesn't work.
Wow, I just can't believe what passes for logic these days.
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You show a fundamental lack of knowledge of what you're actually talking about. Assistants weren't simply animated ways to access help text, they could actually analyze what you're doing and supply recommendations. That was innovative. Annoying, but innovative.
You glossed over the "not the first to do it, just the first to use a piece of clipart" part (paraphased)
What part of "Whether you like the idea or not" don't you understand? You or anyone else liking the idea has no bearing on its novelty.
You don't do your argument any justice by making fallacial comments like this.
You skipped the (again paraphrased) "others did it ages before that by selectively hiding toolbars that did or did not apply to the task at hand" part.
The star had document embedding, but it wasn't live document embedding. You couldn't edit documents in place, and you couldn't update the document elsewhere and have it be updated in the embedded document.
Don't confuse "Someone once did something kind of like that" with lack of novelty. It's not just the base concept, it's the entire concept.
Hmmm... sites that seem to have put far more research into the Xerox Star systems disagree.
That's interesting, sicne I can find no reference to any word processor called Spellbound...
Hmmm... have you tried Google? If so, you just didnt dig far enough. It was released by Sector Software in 1987.
And the only reference to a spell checker is the firefox extension, which certainly did not come out 8 years before Word 95.
I'm also suspect of your IBM reference, given that you seem to conflate way too many concepts to believe your arguments. Do you have a reference?
I could just drop a lot of references, but as you've apparently intentionally skipped the important parts of points I have made (as in the first two), why should I bother? Nonetheless, I did give you a few more hints above.
Sure, I am sure Microsoft innovated something... the KIN being one possibly (never seen more than the commercials and a few online reviews, so I am not sure about that one, but it seems a pretty innovative way of integrating many smartphone and other electronic device features in a novel way)... but the stuff you mention does not fit the category. Nor is the "first 32bit PC operating system" claim Microsoft used to make for Windows 95. Or "their" creation of an improved interface for Windows XP (and 95)... oh wait, they licensed that from SDS. Stop believing marketing hype and actually research what you talk about.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Saying it does not prove it. Show me the prior art. Bear in mind that merely being a tabbed toolbar doesn't make it the same thing. The Ribbon's functionality is what makes it innovative, not the fact that it has tabs.
Corel used a similar method, various word processors I use on OS/2 did. They were tabbed toolbars that were dockable and undockable, and hid or displayed different tools depending on task... toolbars - not "the ribbon" - the only "innovative" difference.
Regarding Photosynth, All new ideas are based on research of others. Newton said something about standing on the shoulders of giants, doesn't make his work any less innovative. Photosynth, as a product, was highly innovative.
They WROTE it for Microsoft. And yes, it IS innovative - I already said that. It wasnt Microsoft's innovation though. It was the university's innovation that Microsoft procured and perfected. An innovator is the one who comes up with the novel way of doing something - not the person who buys/funds/procures/packages it. Unless the packaging happens to be really novel too I guess.
Are you fucking kidding me? OS/2 was created by Microsoft and IBM together. Microosft wrote nearly all of OS/2 up until OS/2 1.3, and COM and OLE goes back to 1987, the same year OS/2 was released *WITHOUT A GUI OF ANY KIND*.
Wow, you are ignorant of history. Wow, that's just plain stupid.
No, YOU are ignorant of history, OS/2 2.0 written by IBM and... oh... just IBM... it was in beta in 1990, already had SOM/DSOM. COM came out in 1993. Microsoft, who had a cross license agreement to the SOM/DSOM (and other OS/2) technology, decided to go it on their own and came up with COM - and still havent managed to make something as versatile as SOM/DSOM. Something, to this day, I notice whenever I am managing a Windows server or using multiple true OS/2 apps in comparison to their Windows equivalents... or when I use the WPS. COM still sucks in comparison.
But again, as you pointed out earlier (the only accurate thing in your post - even though it didnt apply), my likes are irrelevant. So, back to the fact. SOM/DSOM was in testing 3 years before COM was released. And SOM/DSOM was released a year before COM.
And Xeros Star had nothing like COM or OLE. It's object embedding technolgy was entirely different.
Now you're just being stupid. Of course it works. Just because it can't protect from every possible exploit doesn't make it useless or "non working". By that argument, just because someone can root a unix box, that means all of it's security doesn't work.
Wow, I just can't believe what passes for logic these days.
No... it does none of what is promised. various ZoneLabs and other products do what it claims to do. It simply put, does not work. Not "works most of the time" but "barely works at all, while Zone Labs and others figured it out in a method that works with more than one browser instead of just IE7+"
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
An not to forget:
- Clippy and the Windows XP Search Dog
Also I think Microsoft is the main innovator on user annoyance technology.
The only word processor Corel had was WordPerfect, and it did NOT do what the Ribbon does. The fact that you can't actually point out any specific thing, just vague hand waving is evidence enough that you're talking out of your ass.
Regarding COM, you seem to be confusing when a product shipped with when it was created. OS/2 2.0 and OS/2 1.3 were done by IBM yes, and COM was released as a product in 1993 (OLE 2 in 1992), but the actual technology was created by Microsoft in 1987, with white papers written in 1998 and 1990.
COM was not originally a product, but was the basis of OLE 2. It existed for several years before OLE did, and the basic concepts were drawn from whitepapers by Antony Williams in 1998 and 1990.
All of this predated OS/2 2.0 by a great deal, and while betas of OS/2 2.0 were in existence in 1990, the workplace shell and SOM were not.
WPS didn't even appear in betas until sometime around late 1991 (after Windows 3.1 and OLE 2 betas were already shipping)
It's relatively easy to know this because SOM is based on CORBA, and COM and CORBA came out about the same time. CORBA was an RPC based technology while COM was a function dispatch based technology. COM and CORBA came at the same problem from opposite sides, and eventually met in the middle with CORBA moving from distributed objects towards component objects and COM moving from component to distributed.
I point you to this article:
http://www.wincustomize.com/article/81265
In which, it says quite clearly that the reason for OS/2's delay from late 1991 to 1993 was WPS.
This message seems to indicate the first beta that included PWS was late 1991.
http://www.rusbasan.com/Humor/OS2_Dream.html
This infoworld article from July 1991 says that it didn't exist in the beta.
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Yes, I did use google. It's very obscure and there exist very few relative links even when adding "sector software" to the search criteria. and it turns out, it was just a TSR like all those others. This is not the same thing.
You glossed over the "it does more than you claim it does" part. You're using a ridiculous argument, and not coincidentally, it's the same argument most people who criticize software patents use.. focusing on a tiny portion of functionality and ignoring the rest.
The ribbon doesn't merely hide toolbars that are not useful in a given context. Hell, Word did that going back years. The ribbon is entirely context driven, it builds the toolbars dynamically given the current context. It does live previews of how clicking on buttons will affect your document just by hovering over it, just to name a few of it's features.
By the way, care to explain how Microsoft could have claimed that Windows 95 was the first 32 bit PC operating system when Microsoft themselves had created Windows NT (a 32 bit PC operating system) several years earlier?
I think you're still making things up, and attributing them to Microsoft to "prove" your point.
I might stop believing marketing hype if the hype you claim i'm believing actually existed.
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Ribbon
It's interesting that you bring up the "Ribbon" as there is prior art for it, yet Microsoft is trying for a patentland grab on a relativity common User Interface concept.
I hate that damn ribbon, half the time I can't find the things I want and when I do find them and try to go back again later I don't remember where I found them before. If I wasn't forced to use Office at work I would have wiped it off my drive long ago.
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"Saying it does not prove it. Show me the prior art."
Borland Delphi - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Borland_Delphi_4_screenshot.png
"Are you fucking kidding me? OS/2 was created by Microsoft and IBM together."
COM (circa 1987) is not new as well - it was just a standard on vtable format, nothing more. There was _no_ OLE in 1987, not even close. One of the first usages of COM, in fact, was MAPI.
OLE and IDispatch came much later, in 1992 developed mainly for office automation. And by that time they were nothing new as well. For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_distributed_operating_system had not just dynamically accessible objects, but _distributed_ dynamically accessible objects.
So sorry, your examples of innovation are stupid.
Prior art:
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshop/ig/20-Years-of-Photoshop/Photoshop-Elements-1-0-2001.htm
Button and menu controls on the palettes, tabs to switch between control palettes, all of it. Just 'cause the Ribbon is blue doesn't make it new.
Typically employers make their employees sign an agreement when they are hired that any intellectual property they create while performing their job becomes the intellectual property of the employer and the employee loses the rights to it.
Some agreements are even as strict as to say that anything you create while you are employed becomes the IP of your employer. So if you wrote something at home while you are "off the clock" it would still technically be the property of your employer. Booo!
I truly do love the terms of my current employment. I'm employed as a programmer, and I retain "dual copyright" over all of my own creations. Essentially, while I work here, I am also contractually bound to not compete with them, but should I ever leave I can take all of my own code with me and fork it (any images, product names, documentation, or whatever may need to be scrubbed/changed though, since they're not my work). In return for this, they got all of the code I had written before I started here, giving them a nice jumpstart in areas that they were interested in but weren't too keen on doing all the basic startup stuff for.
It's a win-win situation and should I ever choose to go somewhere else, I'll only accept it under the same terms - I have such a massive collection of libraries that I've written now for various purposes, that it'd be truly painful to have to start them from scratch again... One day (perhaps after I leave my current employer), I also hope to release a large amount of it under the GPL, since there's a few GPL projects I'd love to get my libraries in to and also see what others can do with what I've started.
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