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Visual Depiction of Who Is Suing Who in Mobile
Although the graphic itself won't win an award for design,
Norman submitted a story about who's suing who in the mobile universe. From Apple to Qualcomm and pretty much everyone in between, it's a pretty impressive mess.
Microsoft does, on an annual basis:
http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar09/10k_fr_dis.html
If you read through a bit, you will see that they currently incur legal expenses of about $500 million a year and spend about $9 billion a year on R&D.
(Of course, those legal expenses include settlements...)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Probably because we've seen something similar to it before. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/an-explosion-of-mobile-patent-lawsuits/
Because Microsofts patent portfolio is so large and varied that its preferable to enter into a cross licensing deal.
..thats just the short list of companies I found in the first few pages of a google search.
The end result is that most companies *do* cross license with Microsoft without the muss and fuss of a legal battle, because by all rights Microsoft does have some patents of value that you want.
A non-comprehensive list of companies that Microsoft has cross-licensing deal with:
Alpine, Amazon, Apple, Autodesk, Centrify, Denso, Epson, Fuji, Funai, HP, JVC, Kenwood, Lexmark, LG, Lotus, Nikon, Olympus, Onkyo, Panasonic, Pioneer, Samsung, TomTom, Toshiba, and Xerox.
"His name was James Damore."