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Microsoft To Charge Phone Makers a Licensing Fee
angry tapir writes "Microsoft may be one of the only remaining mobile operating-system providers that charges handset makers a licensing fee, but in exchange vendors get at least one important benefit: protection from intellectual property worries. 'Microsoft indemnifies its Windows Phone 7 licensees against patent infringement claims,' the company said. 'We stand behind our product, and step up to our responsibility to clear the necessary IP rights.'"
In related news, Windows Phone 7 will be exclusive to AT&T at launch, and it seems Microsoft is counting on Xbox Live integration to be the "hook" that gets people interested in the new devices.
One of the reasons why big business loves Windows and isn't that interested in Linux other than maybe Red Hat is because if things go horribly wrong, there's somebody with deep pockets to sue. What Microsoft is offering here is a classic part of their business plan... if somebody comes up with a submarine patent they'll take the legal pain so their customers don't have to.
Remember the lesson of SCO and Darl McBride.... even though the claims had no legal merit, they still were messy enough that it was cheaper to pay the settlement price than fight them and win the case. When faced with such a problem, any sane business man will take the less expensive option even if it's not the one that's good for the world.
So, this license fee can be seen as an insurance policy against such patent claims that could bite the handset maker for a mistake the software writers made.
Microsoft has never not charged a license fee. It's pretty steep too.
But they keep pushing this indemnification clause as if it provides some kind of true advantage. It does not. First, it only covers the technology in the OS which MS would necessarily have to protect itself from anyway. Second, if a handset maker were to get sued and lose, they would in turn sue MS for damages. And finally, no one has successfully sued a handset maker for infringed patents in operating systems like Linux.
What this tells me is that they haven't changed their selling strategy one bit, and they haven't got the slightest idea how to change it. Whoever is in charge of their mobile division needs to be replaced. They have a technology that is late to the game and a selling strategy that is worthless to anyone with any experience with other operating systems.
A quick search revealed that at least one embedded Linux vendor offers this too without per-phone royalties:
"Meanwhile, MontaVista added that it protects its customers from technical and legal risks through warranties on all editions of MontaVista Linux and indemnification against claims involving the code it creates and delivers."
Just more FUD IMHO
and charging a fee is grasping at a branch on the way down.
This argument keeps coming up. That somehow, when you pay MS for their "software" you get Bill Gates at your beg and call, ready to deliver an emergency patch at your request.
For normal business, this is far from the case. MS doesn't even know you exist, HP or Dell is your point of contact. You would have to buy MS software worth millions of dollars to get them to notice you and even then, support is far from snappy. With open source I have had routine contact with the lead developers over the years.
And as for sane business men just buying off SCO and the like. Eh, no. That is exactly what did NOT happen. A hint to this might have been that SCO went bankrupt. There were a handful of payoffs and they could all be traced back to MS backing. And even that wasn't enough.
A SANE business man knows that if you start paying of left and right you will soon be out of business.
In fact a sane business man will look at this license and stay the FUCK away from it unless he was paying payed to get close to it. Why? Because apparantly, MS is willing to SUE people who it thinks don't pay it enough. So if next year you decide to dumb MS as your tech partner, will they then turn around and sue?
Go ahead, come into my house. I promise you that if you come into my house, I won't kill you... why are you running away?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I do. I seriously would never buy a phone with a Microsoft OS on it. Because I have a great, irrational fear (based on almost 20 years of Microsoft products) of something going horribly wrong or generally not being what I'd hoped.
For the same reason that I cringe when I see Ford commercials touting a Window experience in my car.
They have gotten better over the years, but there are certain kinds of consumer devices I'd rather not leave to Microsoft just yet.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There's an almost complete lack of hemoglobin in it.
This is a signal that if WinCE 7 (or whatever) doesn't sell well, they're going to go after Android and iPhone handsets with patent claims. Switch to WinCE 7, or something bad might happen to your platform.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
In the same ways Windows generally is lame compared to Linux/Unix. No forking. Spawning processes is slow. CLI is an afterthought because the default CLI sucks and Power Shell doesn't offer much over a Perl install. Remote access is very anemic compared to SSH (no tunneling, it uses SOAP, ..) and what's the point of a remote shell if the shell sucks.
I've learned that the ability to script anything and everything on a server and to be able to do it from anywhere should be essential for an administrator. I say should be because after you've done it for a while, the Windows way feels so, what's the word ... oh yea, anemic, yet Microsoft has serious "not invented here" syndrome and doesn't include this ability by default and the installable options don't compare to those on a base Linux/UNIX install.
And even if you can point at Unix tools for Windows to enable awk, sed, grep or install perl and bash or ssh whatever, it's not the "Windows Way" and the way that nearly all Windows admins run Windows servers. As I'm writing this, I'm frustrated with a Windows admin because they can't write a script to watch a Tomcat log for errors and email the log entry. You know, something simple like grep ERROR logfile | mail -s "to_address".
So yes, Windows Server is anemic.
--Randall