Slashdot Mirror
Google Bid Pi Billion Dollars For Nortel Patents
mikejuk writes "Google mystified other participants in an auction for patents last week by their choice of bids. They weren't the round regular numbers that are normally expected. After first bidding $1,902,160,540 — a reference to Brun's constant — and later bidding $2,614,972,128 for the Meissel-Mertens constant, they ended up submitting a bid for $3.14159 billion. Google ended up losing the auction — but was that a deliberate ploy?"
The deal fails when Nortel askes for exact change.
By rounding instead of bidding pi billion exactly, they angered the Math Gods.
Google's CFO's glad they didn't take the next step after pi: tau (6.28...)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
If Google bid Tau they'd own it!
Geeze!
If they paid in coins, you might say exact change would be even easier than with dollar bills. No "rounding" required in that case :)
Patience is a virtue, but haste is my life.
Their like teh best! I love da g00g|3. Their so rad because dey use da numb3rs.
Who the fuck cares that they used pi? Any 12 year old could have come up with that shit.
I wonder if they were part of a collusive bidding effort. http://www.cramton.umd.edu/papers2000-2004/cramton-schwartz-collusive-bidding.pdf Probably just Google being geeky again though.
If you're willing to bid $3 billion for something, the last thing you want is for someone to bid $3 000 000 001.00, and beat you in the bid. So it is quite routine for bids on large contracts with a closed bidding process to use unusual numbers rather than round numbers. I've seen this in multi-tens or hundreds of million-dollar land acreage bids for the rights to drill for oil. They'll bid $30 545 777.88, and weird things like that. Usually the "extra bit" is a small percentage of the total bid amount, but if you're going to do that, why not have some fun with it? And if you're "mystifying" the other participants, good! That's the whole point -- to keep them guessing and prevent them from figuring out your strategy so they can't bid $1 more.
Too bad they didn't take the auction seriously.
At best, they were engaged in an advertising campaign that had the potential for being extremely expensive (marketing cost = magic number that became their winning bid - lowest bid that would have won). At worst, they were being extremely foolish with shareholders' money, potentially overpaying by hundreds of millions of dollars just because they think some numbers are cool.
All these bids are irrational numbers.
I think the message is clear. Patents have irrational value.
Too bad they didn't take the auction seriously.
Had they wanted to continue, would the next bid have been Feigenbaum's (4.669201609) billion?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Yeah, then Google will buy and change the bitcoin system to allow for just that.
how long until
This is exactly the kind of behavior I would expect from a group of guys who, once routinely stuffed into their high school lockers, have now grown up (?) to become full-fledged white cat-stroking Bond villains.
I give it another 6-9 months more of federal government inquiries and subpoenas before they dig a moat around their campus and fill it with laser-headed sharks...
To be sufficiently rich that you can just start spending money is such quantities that both the size, and the specifically chosen value, signal "I don't give a fuck, because I don't have to!"
Well, normally I think companies try and figure a ballpark figure that might be good for their bid. They then round it arbitrarily to "round" numbers that are near their ballpark figure. This is susceptible to the same overpaying problem in that a round number may be greater than the lowest bid the would have won.
In this case, they were just using universal constants as their round numbers.
That's a big piece of pi.
-Charlie
Lol, Google guyz are math Maniacs they have already done such stuff in past for many times, i remember 1 they raised their market Cap in 2004 by e-billion dollars $2,718,281,828.
Nice to see a company with some sense of (dork) humor. I'd have liked to see the faces when the bids came in with these numbers lol
We're bidding billions of dollars and we round Pi off at 5 decimal places?
They should have bid $3,141,592,653.59.
No, their last bid would of course have been $googol = $10^100 - after all, they named their company after that number!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
one googol. Now that would have been hilarious.
When I read this article, there were exactly 42 comments posted!
Oh, damn....
sigfault (core dumped)
I don't need a license. I just need the hardware and will install my own OS. Thank you.
You have to wonder if all the wires are plugged in when you make billion dollar bids based on math constants.
And so should most of these patents be, also.
Good job they didn't go to graham's number.
I'll bet dimes to dollars none of the principals on this deal "got it". It's science, after all, and scientists are just manual laborers, in the same sort of class as plumbers. The only good people in society are in finance and top corporate management.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
and later bidding $2,614,972,128 for the Meissel-Mertens constant
Wait, what? You can buy constants now? This patent thing is getting out of hand!
Use people!
A tech company that can convince the bean counters to bid in Pi and other such constants deserves more power!
That's a nice round number.
-- QED
And bid Google dollars
They would have gotten it if they bid tau (2 * pi) billion dollars.
End software patents, leave this consortium with 4.5 billions dollars worth of paper.
In any case, I hope this deal fails to pass regulatory inspection. Apple monopolizing smartphones with patents is probably worth 10-20 billion to them. No one should be able to monopolize technology. The whole idea of patents made more sense hundreds of years ago when everything was trade secrets, but in the information age it's just a way to create artificial monopolies on certain technologies.
... the area proscribed by a circle is ...
I am mulling over the concept of a circle proscribing its own area.
Google can be so irrational sometimes. tehe
I love Google! :-)
They bring joy to the world and employment to the masses (including me!).
No, their last bid would have been the inspiration for the name of their campus.
$googolplex = $10^(10^100)
Of course the rules would have had to allow bids to be accepted in scientific notation as writing out the number in decimal would have taken longer than the lifespan of the Earth.
I had a math prof in college who didn't know this fact. Sad.
"Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two" -- RFC 1925
First, if Google was going to go all math crazy with their bids, they should have started their bid with $phi billion. Second, why didn't they just go the Fibonacci route?
"Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two" -- RFC 1925
Of course the rules would have had to allow bids to be accepted in scientific notation as writing out the number in decimal would have taken longer than the lifespan of the Earth.
It would have been a fair bit harder than that: there aren't even a googolplex of atoms in the Universe to write the number on.
Google now can spend 1 or 2 billion buying some anti-patent legislation (like MS bought a law months ago) and destroy 4.5 billion of his enemies (and even regain some "Don't be evil" karma), all with one smart move. This could even protect them from other expensive and baseless suits in the future and, as a bonus, mock at Apple and MS for their futile expenditure. Talk about money well spent.
Can someone please stop this patent madness and resume innovation? Please? Can't USA see that it's hurting so much more than helping (if it helps)? If it would affect only USA, I would be the first to say "go on" but it hurts all the world, even if indirectly.
You are assuming that some software patent reform doesn't happen. At some point when this becomes a big enough stink, something will change. Maybe all those billions will end up having been paid for worthless software patents. Now that would be a laugh. But it would be fitting. Paying billions for the ability to harm your competitors. It is beyond clear that these patents are being acquired for no other purpose.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Funny stuff with numbers in the billions of dollar range. Should greatly amuse all the starving children in Africa.
Umm... I can't imagine that number, how much is it in bailouts?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To be fair, it's not a unit that you'd need in everyday life, not even as a math prof.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
More likely, some of the Chinese handset makers will pull out of the US market entirely. India, China, and the EU provide a very large market for mobile phones and don't accept software patents. There are still profits to be made in phones that can't be imported into the USA. And maybe then US legislators will get fed up with everyone showing off their not-available-in-the-US phones at international conferences and do something about the situation. Mind you, they'll probably do the same thing they did with Blackberry and just say the import restrictions only apply to phones for non-government use...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...to get another news headline on Slashdot? Well it worked.
Juuuust posting to say that tau is better than pi. Suck it, haters.
why? it's a piece of useless trivia, notable only for being a "large" number (and it isn't that large, compared to some mathematically relevant numbers).
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
WebOS is officially dead as a mobile platform.
Every company with a long term mobile strategy joined the grand alliance to win the Nortel patents to fight against Google.
HP can't license WebOS to other handset makers now --- because HP can't give them 4G patent protection.
Google's obviously behind the times - they should have bid Tau, not Pi. :-)
Google certainly won that bid.
Maybe all those billions will end up having been paid for worthless software patents.
Correct, that would be the best outcome. I thought about this too, and the question that I have been asking myself is whether such a reform would be legal at all. I can imagine a reform that forbids NEW patents, but invalidating EXISTING ones retroactively? Wouldn't that be prohibited by some "no punishment without pre-existing law" meta-law?
Why not e billion? anything else would be unnatural.
They probably could have bought these patents but obviously they are not worth that much to them. So their competitors paid for these patents more than Google was ready to pay for it, hence, as far as Google was concerned their competitors paid more than the patents are worth.
Bidding round numbers is a bad idea, you will learn it quickly on eBay (or maybe not since 99% items now are BuyItNow stuff that is cheaper on DealExtreme anyway).
This was not a deliberate ploy by Google - for what, to have Apple and Microsoft cough up a fraction of $4.5b? That amount will have absolutely no effect on their business. I am just baffled as to why Google didn't up their bid. They have $30b in cash.
Well, that's the largest constant I could think of.
Even on scientific notation, a googolplex is quite hard to write, I don't think the auction forms have space for a hundred zeros. 10^10^100 isn't scientific notation, you know.
-Kz-
"exact" is the operative word here.
three,
Central Ohio Home Theater Installation - The Theater People
you didn't think of googol+1? ;-)
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
That's a lotta Pi!
They are business with real shareholders and do not need to be playing with geek money games. At least not at the executive level as it makes your corporate image for Wall Street and the business community down. Either get real with the offer or decide not to bother.
They are a business first and foremost.
http://saveie6.com/
They're obviously trolling the patent sale.
Engadget thought this was a story...quickly, post it two days late!
You can't patent numbers or algorithms, which is exactly what software is. Their bids were their tongue-in-cheek way of trying to point that out yet again. Software under no circumstances should be protected under patent law, and instead should fall purely under copyright law. Maybe one day when someone appoints a Judge that has experience there will be someone who "gets" it.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Google has a sentient bidding algorithm and it's trying to communicate.
The majority of Nortel's patents would be hardware - being a telecomms manufacturer and all. Software patents are completely irrelevant.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Unfortunately this may spell the end of "cheap" Android phones since the LTE patents would need to be licensed. Google should have been more serious, but this kinda smells like they may not be committed to the Android platform.
You couldn't be more wrong. The manufacturers get the required radio patent licenses either directly or with their radio chipsets (Broadcom, etc), not with the OS. This won't affect anything at all.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Nortel makes hardware. Many (most) of those patents would be hardware patents, completely unaffected by software patent reform.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Google could have saved some of their money by bidding e billion dollars instead of pi billion, with e - a.k.a. "Euler's number" - given as 2.71828...
But wait, they saved all of their money anyway, by just bidding not enough...
Disregarding the auction's outcome, Google made a very nice and subtle statement against the lowly "just natural or rational numbers considered here" approach as practised by nearly all accountants and corporate finance guys. ;-)
Google made a virtual bid (just for laughs) for virtual property (intellectual property), claiming it maybe would be useful in a legal battle over hazy interpretations of virtual properties, aka a patent battle. If they won, they likely would pay in virtual money (stocks).
Somehow I think we're all in a non-virtual mess.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/