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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.'"
The main ones are long filenames in FAT, ex-FAT for > 32GB SD cards, and ActiveSync.
There are alternatives for all of these, but in the case of Activesync alternatives, they are not as good, and in the case of FAT, it means getting the same filesystem drivers onto other computers and devices.
Yeah?
coverage: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/feds-may-use-subpoena-powers-to-study-patent-trolls/
explanation: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2013041110212889
give it a few months. The wheels are turning, slowly but surely.
this isn't how the system is designed or intended, this is how the system has been perverted.
making money off products you do not have any involvement in via patent extortion is a sign of a broken system and this is already reaching antitrust investigations.
Well I agree that the system is broken in various ways, but the point of the patent system is to make money off things that you aren't involved in. To allow & encourage people to publish their inventions in return for a cut whenever someone uses that invention. It is supposed to encourage invention, by allowing a monopoly to the first person to do something. They are not supposed to have to make a working product, just to publish their idea so that someone else might.
Now whether that's a good idea anymore is another discussion, but what you describe is what patents are designed to do.