Microsoft's Most Profitable Mobile Operating System: Android

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 9, 2013 @02:14AM from the profit-through-judo dept.

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.'"

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Re:Does anyone have a list of the patents? by jonbryce · 2013-05-09 02:33 · Score: 5, Informative

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.