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Microsoft's Most Profitable Mobile Operating System: Android
puddingebola writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a piece of commentary discussing Microsoft's profit from their patent claims on Android. From the article, 'To some, Windows 8 is a marketplace failure. But its flop has been nothing compared to Microsoft's problems in getting anyone to use its Windows Phone operating systems. You don't need to worry about Microsoft's bottom line though. Thanks to its Android patent agreements, Microsoft may be making as much as $8 per Android device. This could give Microsoft as much as $3.4 billion in 2013 from Android sales.'"
Microsoft shouldn't get one red cent from the manufacturers, or Google.
So after all... Microsoft is making money on Linux.
If Microsoft had pushed out the OS a couple of years earlier the mobile phone market would likely be a very different place.
Yep, and if my grandma had wheels she'd be a WAGON.
What technology is MS licensing?
Why can't we / someone work around it?
If Microsoft can make enough money operating simply operating as a patent troll maybe they can leave the actual software market to people who actually know how to write and maintain software rather than as license extortionists for software that has only become a de facto standard through marketing and guile and really doesn't run very well.
If like Windows Mobile.. they shutdown the Windows Phone project and focus on what they are good at. Or people actually want to buy.
The developers working on Windows Phone could be shifted over to Xbox or Office.
I can't imagine how big the losses are in Windows Phone, but if they invest all the Android Money at beating their own success licensing to Android.. because they think they will gain back the over 50% market share [from themselves??] It could be tripled damages to Microsoft's bottom line.
As an investor in Microsoft.. I think shareholders would revolt at their waste.
Learn from a past president, declare Victory and move on.
All Google needs to do is offer a commercial licence, for a small fee, to all Android OEM's that indemnifies them. This way if Microsoft has an issue with Android or Linux they can take on Google directly. But, we all know that would never happen because Microsoft clearly knows that Google would single handily invalidate all of their obvious, worthless and prior art ridden patents one by one.
well, few years ago they thought that it was nice to have an actual os.
there's nice things about wp8. being a smartphone os isn't one of them though. feature by feature it's a featurephone. no taskswitcher, no proper multitasking(STILL!).. which is just fine for phones but not for gigantic multimedia slabs like the 920. sure, not much venues for malware either, since there's just so much you can do if you as the owner of the device actually want to do..
though I don't know what's so great about rectangles on desktop or icons and text on a mile long list instead of icons on desktop... only having selections on screen for relevant things isn't that bad though.
yeah yeah it's understandable why they don't allow proper multitasking when a trivial app easily gobs up 40 megs of ram whilst it's on foreground. don't ask me where the fuck the memory is going, the program logic in these apps was done in less than a meg on phones 10 years ago.. and the increase in resolution doesn't add up to the memory usage.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
From the Constitution: "...by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their..." The patents are from the Jurassic age, in software years.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
So if Windows Phone were shutdown.
There would be no barrier to native Office for Android, or Office for Apple iOS devices. [Just like the old days, competing with Wordstar and Lotus or Borland]
Even better they could shift the developers for Windows Phone over to developing Mobile versions of all their Apps and tools to Android and iOS versions.
They should "own" the Mobile App market on Android and iOS, and stop loosing money on Windows Phone.
The current mindset of tossing good money after bad.. is just plain stupidity and stubborness.. its a culture of "we can't be wrong".
Except it does actually have a taskswitcher.
B&N were sued over these 'patents'. B&N counterclaimed, on the basis that the patents they had seen were garbage, and Microsoft wouldn't show what it was claiming unless an NDA was signed.
Microsoft did a deal with B&N, they set up a joint subsidiary, Nook Media, into which Microsoft would invest, and B&N would switch from Android and license these imaginary patents Microsoft was claiming. But see, it wasn't like MS *bought* them off, no sir, that would raise anti-trust concerns, no, they were *investing* in a subsidiary.
No surprises then, that B&N is being bought out for $1 billion:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/09/microsoft-nook-media/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget
So the effect is Microsoft paid $1 billion to Barnes and Noble in exchange for them licensing patents that are so weak, Microsoft won't discuss them in public.
And every deal has been like that, Nokia got $2 billion not to switch to Android, Samsung got a big payoff, HTC did. Submitted pretends Microsoft is making money off Android using these patents, but its really just handing a big wad of cash and receiving it back very slowly. In exchange the handset maker supports Microsoft's phone platform.
No traction, no attraction.
The problem with Windows Phone, is apathetic lack of interest in the "same thing" from yet another company, that makes things hard on customers.
Have you even tried to find a Windows Phone? "Scarce as Hens teeth.." as my Grandmother used to say.
About the only way you might get one is order one online and avoid any sort of help online from people.. first person you talk to will try to sway you away from one.
I gave up.. I actually wanted to develop apps for it.. and it just became too much frustration.. so I got an Android phone to develop for Microsoft's "other platform"
Situation totally reminds me of Windows Mobile, same people must be running that division.. or they got soaked in the same gasoline and are burning money like its going out of style.
At least give Microsoft credit.. they finally.. finally shut down Xune. And finally, finally, finally shutdown Windows Mobile.
They would ahve done better to buy Palm or bought Blackberry.
Microsoft just doesn't know how to do Mobile.
As for home theatre, they should use iSCSI everywhere.. quietest drive possible.. and they embed iSCSI target and initator in every windows product.
Maybe my idiot factor is high today, but what are yous saying? if the "entire Android community could then try to code around this kind of larceny and extortion." then they should get going, because the fees from the patents are already in place. What are they waiting for?
no comment
"What has two wheels and moves really fast?
Me! Holding two wheels"
(Mr T, World's Craziest Fools)
as a near-term 'water bailing' strategy for microsoft but at some point, google will either adopt smarter strategies to avoid the patents entirely, buy the patents outright, or challenge them in court. considering how microsoft has been almost worthless for more than a decade in the smart phone industry though ill have to quote the words of Tony Stark, "You're missing the point. There's no throne, there is no version of this, where you come out on top."
Good people go to bed earlier.
It doesn't have a massive "app store" like the Play store or iOS but it does seem to have everything I use.
Duh! Of course it has everything you USE. You couldn't use it if it wasn't on your phone. However, that tells us nothing about whether it has everything you *want*, or everything you *need*.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The tapeworm of the technology sector.
I can't believe there isn't an GNUphone yet.
RMS must be spinning in his chair.
Or the GnomePhone
..in my ivory tower built from free software and dumbphones.
I don't share your pain.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
It's like slashdot is Vaughan-Nichols's own private distribution channel. Slashdot stories quoting or linking to him in reverse chronological order:
Microsoft's Most Profitable Mobile Operating System: Android: May 09, 2013
Microsoft's "New Coke" Moment?: May 06, 2013
Windows: Not Doomed Yet: April 19, 2013
UEFI Secure Boot and Linux: Where Things Stand: August 03, 2012
Linus' Lessons On Software Dev Management: September 26, 2011
7 Days With a Google Chromebook: July 18, 2011
Linux-Friendly Alternatives To Skype: May 19, 2011
Bill Gates Doesn't Work At Microsoft Anymore: June 23, 2010
Here Come the Linux iPad Clones: March 12, 2010
Fast Wi-Fi's Slow Road To Standardization: December 10, 2009
Apple Pushes Unwanted Software To PCs, Again: September 28, 2009
London Stock Exchange To Abandon Windows: July 03, 2009
Confirmed Gmail / Google App Outage: May 14, 2009
Why It's Not Business As Usual For Microsoft: June 09, 2008
Malware vs. Anti-Malware, 20 Years Into The Fray: May 06, 2008
Truth Behind the ClearType/OpenSUSE FUD: April 12, 2007
Groklaw No Front for IBM: February 15, 2007
That was only the first 3-4 pages of google results.
There is a task switcher (hold down the back button and a list pops up with thumbnails from your open app). Also, with WP8, any app can run in the background as long as it conforms to certain rules about resource utilization. Not many apps use the feature yet, but the key ones like Skype do, where you want the app to do something even if the app is running in the background.
Why are manufacturers paying this extortion rather than banding together and trying to fight it like any other patent troll?
What is Google's position on this and why aren't they indemnifying manufacturers that use Android or fighting this themselves?
I have no personal experience here, but this UDF compatibility matrix does not look too promising. Apparently there are five UDF versions and three variants within each version, and only the oldest versions (from 1996-1997) actually have wide OS support.
A bit more googling produces more comments from users about tricky incompatibilities.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
As in "Why should I buy it".
If, for example, rsynch does the job they do, why would ActiveSynch be wanted? What does it do? Why is it that ONLY ActiveSynch is good enough? Because by saying that it's so great, you're implicitly stating that the alternatives don't do something essential at all.
Lawyers. Nice one Bill, you're not part of the problem at all.
4) Pay back in "Marketing aid" as much, or more, money than the cost of the license.
Microsoft Legal Research has shown that even within an enormous company, innovative divisions can still develop profitable products. It's all about management understanding the full potential of the one part of the company who is still serving the interests of stockholders. To those who say Microsoft ought to shut down and cash out to their stockholders, I caution you against drawing too broad of a conclusion. Market analysts say that some of Microsoft assets are predicted to generate a good profit for the next 20 years. Strangely, it's exactly 20 years, not a day more or less. I wonder why.
Is this licensing thing really profitable for MS? They've been known for abusing their monopoly to conserve and extend their monopoly and now they're lamely extorting money from Linux / Android vendors?
Doesn't seem that much of a threatening MS anymore and doesn't seem a very smart thing to do for them in the long run: in a world were 99% of the phones / tablets / gizmos out there are going to be either iOS or Android, how relevant is MS still going to be!?
than actually making products that don't suck. Implication? Corporate leeches and legal parasites have changed the legal environment to favor their existence by purchasing laws via bribes labeled as "campaign contributions." Tell me again how, as an individual ISV or inventor, I could *ever* be successful in the USA's current legal environment?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
...sponge off of those who can.
If Microsoft hadn't planted a trojan horse as Nokia's CEO, the mobile phone market would likely be a very different place: MeeGo would be now a strong contender versus iOS and Android. No change for Windows Phone, of course, it would be as dead as it is now.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Blackmail for instance.
Brinksmanship would be another.
If Microsoft had pushed out the OS a couple of years earlier the mobile phone market would likely be a very different place.
Microsoft had a more capable mobile OS in 2001 than they have now with WP8. The hardware has finally reached a point where Windows Mobile could shine but they gave up and bought Danger and trotted out the Kin which they spent over 2 years developing but gave up on in less than 6 mo. They were so desperate to get Windows Phone out the door they left crucial features and backward compatibility out completely. Microsoft is all about bailing the water out of the boat instead of patching the leak.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Tell me again how, as an individual ISV or inventor, I could *ever* be successful in the USA's current legal environment?
Apparently, it's quite simple. Just look at the current state of the arts and start filing patents for the next obvious innovation. Used to be "$X on a computer", then "$X on the Internet" now "$X on mobiles". So, the next big thing will be private "clouds" -- streaming your media collection from your home NAS, what's next after that? Synchronizing your whole family's individual private clouds so that they can share redundant backups of everything, and you just buy a new PC or NAS and plug it in, put in your password, and you're all set. It's quite easy to predict the tech around that, and then the tech around the next innovation, etc, etc. Even if you only get 10% right, you've still got a bunch of ideas locked up in patents.
Now, here's the key thing: DO NOT MAKE ANY OF IT. You can't actually make anything because the other technologies you'll need to implement atop are all tied up in patents and the established companies will sue you out of existance and buy your patents for cheap... Corporations are immortal, they can just choose to waste 20 years of time not licensing a patent. However, if you don't make anything you can just wait till everyone else does -- I mean, these are obvious innovations we're talking here, so they'll come about pretty quickly. Since you don't make anything, they can't sue you back for infringing any of their patents, you just use your own patents to bash them with.
So long as you rent an empty suite in an office building for your shell corp in East Texas, you can sue there, where they're favorable to the economy of Artificially Scarce Ideas. If you get big enough, then you just move your money overseas in a Double Irish so that if worse comes to worse, you can coast quite comfortably on the money you save by not paying any taxes on your intangible intellectual property rights.
In short: Become that which you despise. That is the way of the Sith.
They intentionally hide infringing patents behind NDA, walking from vendor to vendor and shaking up money from. In normal, non-corrupt system this should qualify as racketeering and should be prosecuted as such. Unfortunately, in dysfunctional US legal there is nothing big corporation could be successfully prosecuted and properly fined. If you look at such fiascos as HSBC drug cartels money laundering operation (those fucks created dedicated organization for this purpose and essentially walked out scott free!), Microsoft's patent racket looks like small potatoes in comparison.
LOL. Have you ever *been* to East Texas? The "office building" would have to be a broken down trailer, right next to the fellow who lost all his teeth in his last meth holiday (I have a cabin there).
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If you pay attention to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at all, you'll know he always frames fact and opinion in a way to try to make you think Microsoft is evil and bad and about to die. He has zero credibility.
http://chicagodave.wordpress.com
If Microsoft hadn't planted a trojan horse as Nokia's CEO, the mobile phone market would likely be a very different place: MeeGo would be now a strong contender versus iOS and Android. No change for Windows Phone, of course, it would be as dead as it is now.
How exactly did they manage to "plant" him in your view?
As has been mentioned already, B&N already won against Microsoft regarding these patents so clearly they're not exactly paragons of validity.
The other players don't want to upset Microsoft because they sell Microsoft products on their hardware.
Barnes and Noble have already won against Microsoft on these patents, so they can't be all that great.
Why should the life of the author even be part of the copyright term at all? Why should copyright in a work whose author lives for another 70 years last longer than copyright in a work published the same day whose author dies the next day?
The point of the GNU phone would of course be that it doesn't [track your location]
I hope you were going for Funny because selling a mobile phone that doesn't track your location is a crime under E911 statutes.
Windows Mobile lost to the less capable OSs (iOS and Android) because of terrible user experience. Capabilities do not matter to anyone but hardcore geeks. It is user experience that matters.
Quit being an inventor and become an artist. A corporation can wait out 20 years for a patent to expire, but it can't as easily wait out life plus 70 for a copyright to expire.
Most PCs don't have a microSD slot; they have to use either an adapter in the SD slot or an adapter plugged into the USB port. One could just use the Android device as a microSD adapter to transfer files on and off the Ext-formatted card using MTP over USB or FTP or SMB over Wi-Fi. I've had the most luck using SMB over Wi-Fi to move files on and off my Nexus 7 tablet.
How is this a troll? Even if you don't agree with a single word, I don't think its a troll comment.
The patented implementation of long file names in FAT is the only implementation that Windows understands. Therefore, licensing is required for interoperability unless you want to, say, store all files in a zip file and store the zip file with a short file name.
Joe's laptop is most likely using NTFS, so he will be copying to a different filesystem regardless of whether it is exFAT or Ext3.
The difference is that the driver for exFAT comes with Windows and the driver for Ext3 does not. One would have to gain Internet access, download the Ext3 driver, and convince a member of the Administrators group to run its installer.
The patented implementation of long file names in FAT is the only implementation that Windows understands. Therefore, licensing is required for interoperability unless you want to, say, store all files in a zip file and store the zip file with a short file name.
I think this is not entirely correct. As I understand it, the patent only applies if you store both the short name and the long name. You can, with a bit of trickery, store only the long name or only the short name, and if you do that in precisely the right way, both Windows and the most common non-Windows VFAT implementations will do something close to the right thing (if there is a right thing on a file system as broken as VFAT). IBM proposed a patch to the Linux kernel to do so back in 2009, but the patch was rejected.
However the discussion is fairly moot because a modern FAT implementation needs exFAT support, and Microsoft has secured multiple patents on that.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
No wonder
I have not been following Microsofts Rise, but the stock rose on the News that Microsoft financial statements were better than expected, and even though news of Windows being awful..which turned out to be true. It remained profitable in other areas; due to price rises elsewhere and live services on its EOL console. It rose again on news of a large investment by a third party know for positively influencing companies.
For patents on physical devices a working prototype must be submitted or demonstrated. I fail to see why this should not be the case for software.
And I fail to see how it'd be unreasonable to include with the patent application a Raspberry Pi computer containing an implementation of the patented process.
I'm picturing the western world reduced down to pre-industrial levels due to patent fights
I fail to see how. Patents last twenty years, leaving us with 1993 tech. In fact, patents are the only sort of "intellectual property" with a relevant expiration date.
How can a set of two questions and zero claims contain stupid claims is beyond me.
Betteridge's law of headlines is that the answer to a yes or no question in a news headline is "no" far more often than "yes". Perhaps someone interpreted "What's so magical and special about ActiveSync" as a Betteridge rhetorical question with the answer "nothing".
any good reason not to use UDF for large flash cards?
A lot of devices that are not personal computers expect removable writable media other than optical discs to be formatted FAT and only FAT. Game consoles and other living room entertainment devices are among them.
it has read and write support in linux, mac and windows.
Not Windows XP, which has 11 months left of extended support.
The hope is that the income from the copyright will encourage the author to create more works
Giving lifelong copyright encourages the author to create one successful work and live off residuals. A 28-year copyright, as envisioned in the Copyright Act of 1790, would give the author 28 years to create another hit just as drug companies have a decade or so of patent exclusivity to find the next blockbuster drug.
Since it is difficult to encourage dead people to do anything
I'm guessing it has something to do with encouraging the heirs to prepare unfinished manuscripts for publication. But a fixed period after publication would do the same.
WMDC is the slowest program in the history of mankind
I worked for a company developing warehouse software for a bunch of Symbol (now Motorola) barcode scanners running Windows CE. I worked around the dain bramage by running the application on a web server and presenting the user interface through the included Internet Explorer over Wi-Fi. Then I used the included ScanWedge app to turn scans into keypresses and form submissions, and it's still in use at Phil's Hobby Shop.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's countermeasures are already in place. First, Windows appears unable to see past the first partition on removable media. The workaround may have to store the Ext2 file system image on the FAT file system and mount it with loopback. Second, I was under the impression that one had to be an administrator to install a file system driver.
Have you even tried to find a Windows Phone? [...] I gave up.. I actually wanted to develop apps for it.. and it just became too much frustration
I suspect the "I actually wanted to develop for it" was a lie, too... given that they're so easy to find and the dev tools are free for it.
I was under the impression that it was like the iPhone, costing a recurring fee to be able to run programs that you wrote on a device that you own. This link claims that each "valid and current developer account on Windows Phone Dev Center [...] lets you register three devices for app development", and this link claims that a developer account costs $99 and self-destructs after 365 days.
Hell if I know how, but his behavior shows clearly what he is.
Circumcision is child abuse.
So what are the patent claims on Android.
And why can't we just rewrite them or make the
government sue them and invalidate the stupid ones.
And if MS will not list them, that should another reason
the government should be made to sue them.
I know its not the case that the government works for the people.
We need to fix that.
Hell if I know how, but his behavior shows clearly what he is.
Ah, should have understood that a conspiracy theory would have such a solid foundation. BTW This is Nokia's 5 year stock price chart, can you spot where Elop ruined the company?