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Microsoft's Hottest New Profit Center: Android
jbrodkin writes "One of Microsoft's hottest new profit centers is a smartphone platform you've definitely heard of: Android. Google's Linux-based mobile operating system is a favorite target for Microsoft's patent attorneys, who are suing numerous Android vendors and just today announced that another manufacturer has agreed to write checks to Microsoft every time it ships an Android device. Vendors paying off Microsoft for the right to use Android now include HTC, Velocity Micro, General Dynamics, Onkyo Corp. and Wistron. Microsoft likely makes more money from Android than its own Windows phone platform, and its latest patent agreement announced Tuesday indicates Microsoft is also going after Google's Linux-based Chromebooks."
So Microsoft is becoming even more a lawyer company, and a bit less a technical one. If this is true, I won't bet one Microsoft share's raising again.... Did they hire SCO attorneys or laywers? :-)
Only together can MS and Google overthrow Apple and rule the galaxy as father and son.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Barnes & Noble is standing up to Microsoft. (buy a Nook to help out!)
http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/04/27/barnes-noble-microsoft-patented-nook-features-trivial-licensing-fees-exorbitant/
I hear if you say Darl McBrides name 3 times in a mirror he will appear and speak to you about his litigation techniques. A few days later you'll receive a cease and desist followed by a lawsuit about trade secrets from Microsoft.
You heard it here first, folks; Dr. Bob the chiropractic quack practices "aggressive manipulation" on 9 year old boys.
Microsoft likely makes more money from Android than its own Windows phone platform,
This statement just cries out for at least a small amount of supporting evidence. The article doesn't appear to make this claim - so did jbrodkin simply pull this out of his nether regions, as I suspect?
#DeleteChrome
How can any company expect to profit from 'purchased patents'. I don't think it'd fly in the more civilised world. If this is the case: NO Mercy. Even if Google won with pi*10^9 dollars, what good would it really be in the end? Let the innovators and not the trolls make out technology.
BillSF
They never really were a tech company, IMO. Their innovations: EULA and software licensing. Most of their products were bought, copied stolen.
Hope is the currency of fools
I have no idea what that meant, but I like it.
I would, if they were sold outside the US.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Microsoft has enough money to spend on court battles that many companies would rather pay the protection money than say "f#ck you". Sad, but that's the way it is. This is why monopolies are not such a good thing.
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You know, last I heard, hundreds of Facebook friends was almost the exact same thing as a medical license. In fact, once I get a few more friends I intent to remove my own appendix.
Android is not the only ecosystem they shake down for protection money.
Sadly, if your Android based device is using stuff that is covered in patents Microsoft owns ... the platform is irrelevant.
The problem has nothing to do with Linux, and everything to do with how utterly broken software patents are. There's so many of them that a 'skilled practitioner' (ie pretty much any programmer) could develop as being a fairly logical application of other things. In many cases, it's stuff that those of us who took CS in school were actually taught in class, or is stuff that other people had developed years before.
Being Linux doesn't give you a free pass from the suck that is over-broad patents.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Microsoft likely makes more money from Android than its own Windows phone platform,
This statement just cries out for at least a small amount of supporting evidence. The article doesn't appear to make this claim - so did jbrodkin simply pull this out of his nether regions, as I suspect?
It's been the subject of recent speculation given the numbers that HTC pays them $5 for each phone and has sold 30 million sets totaling $150 million. And then compare to what WP7 makes MS:
Microsoft has admitted selling 2 million WP7 licenses, and assuming a price of $15 per license, that's $30 million in revenue.
Okay so that could be incorrect but we're just seeing more and more Android licenses resulting in payment to Microsoft. And I don't think WP7 is keeping up with that.
Is this conclusive? Not at all. The above numbers could be false. Is it probable? Well, that's for you to decide.
My work here is dung.
Back when Microsoft started making waves about their patents, one of the things often shouted here on /. was "put up or shut up, tell us exactly which patents are being infringed." Nobody ever says what they are (though I think a FAT32 patent on legacy-formatted SD cards might have been mentioned).
What's funny is that the silence didn't mean Microsoft was doomed to lose. AFAIK all the settlements are under NDAs (is this incorrect?). That means that nobody can even prevent the threats by making sure they don't infringe.
I think licensing NDAs should be illegal. Not only do they passively encourage other acts of infringement, but they obscure the cost of patents that society is bearing. Of course, to patent trolls, these two reasons against license NDAs, are reasons for them...
BTW, I don't think making such NDAs illegal would be an infringement of anyone's privacy rights or overreaching government involvement. We're talking about patents, so the premise is that the government is already involved in the transaction, by means of threatening the use of force (courts) against one of the participants. If you want privacy, use a trade secret instead. (It's not that laissez faire is necessarily wrong, but under laissez faire you can't have patents anyway, so the very discussion starts with the idea that laissez faire is off the table.)
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Might is try I is probably not understand comment yours.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Isn't that the whole point of having a patent system at all? So that your competitors can't just steal your ideas and undersell you to drive you out of business?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Mostly correct, not just FAT based, but it used the same technique for storing long file names in a FAT file system that Microsoft patented. If TomTom would have stuck with 8.3 filenames they would have been ok.
Interesting. If these companies are licensing patents, isn't it law that those be disclosed on the "credits" screen or something??? I thought if an item sold had a patent on it it legally MUST have the number on it to be valid. As these companies are essentially paying for a license, there should be a page crediting these Microsoft patents.
here are a few of the patents Microsoft claims against Android:
People also expect to be able to access command windows without interfering with the application's main window, and to be able to tab through various screens to find the information they need. Microsoft's patents enable the opening of a new, tabbed control window. (U.S. Patent No. 5,889,522)
Surfing the web quickly is a key device feature. One of the patents in this case enables devices to show the content of a page even while the background is still rendering, allowing users to interact with the page more quickly. (U.S. Patent No. 5,778,372)
Users also want to know the status of their downloads. A Microsoft patent provides information about download status on top of the content display. (U.S. Patent No. 6,339,780)
The ability to select text is critical to working with documents. One of our patents enables users to select text, see what is selected via highlighting, and expand the selection in either direction as desired. (U.S. Patent No. 6,891,551)
Users also want to annotate e-books and other documents. A Microsoft patent allows people to insert and review annotations without changing the underlying document, and to select annotations and be brought to the related portion of the document. (U.S. Patent No. 6,957,233)
Simple solution - just make a change to how contract law works. A contract is legally binding when two parties communicate their agreement to be bound to the terms to a court, which then publishes the contract.
If you keep the terms of an agreement secret, then a court will not uphold that agreement. That means that if you secretly pay MS a lot of money not to sue you, they can sue you anyway. Hence, nobody will secretly pay a lot of money to MS not to sue them.
While we're at it, in the special case of transfers of real-estate the court keeps an index of property owners, updated based on those published contracts. No need for title insurance now, either.
If in the future the patents are found groundless, will all those who paid get their money back?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"