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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.
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
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.
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