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Microsoft Makes an Astonishing $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties
mrspoonsi sends this report from Business Insider:
"Microsoft is generating $2 billion per year in revenue from Android patent royalties, says Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund in a new note on the company. He estimates that the Android revenue has a 95% margin, so it's pretty much all profit. This money, says Sherlund, helps Microsoft hide the fact that its mobile and Xbox groups are burning serious cash."
Hardware is cheap.
Software is expensive.
Charging for IDEAS, though... THAT is where the real money is.
THL phish sticks
However the test used in the patent systems worldwide tends to be along the lines: "to one skilled in the art".
It's the same in America. The difference is, the art isn't engineering, it's lawyering.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
They could just implement their own system, like Ext4 or something, the problem being that Fat and NTFS are like the only things Windows can read and write. You can get some programs that let you do it, but they are not as seamless as something like fuse is in Linux mounting windows partitions. It is a problem created by Microsoft, which apparently they have earned 2 billion for.
Microsoft isn't patent trolling here. They would be patent trolling if they were simply holding onto broadly defined patents to use them offensively. The patents in question, which I believe relate to data storage and file systems, have been used by Microsoft for a very long time and have been challenged unsuccessfully before. Microsoft's own engineers did the work, not Google's. Google and various Android manufacturers are free to not implement them.
Patents aren't about promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, they're about a business model based on rent-extraction via arcane legal means. As alternative manufacturing options such as 3D printing mature (assuming they're not strangled by the patent titans) patents will become as obsolete and ineffective as copyright is now.
They're trolling.
So they're indirect patent trolls via Intellectual Ventures and Rockstar?
Not as long as Microsoft filesystems are the de-facto file systems for SD cards by virtue of their desktop monopoly.
Funny.
But seriously, open your fucking eyes, people. Here we have a private enterprise that put a break on the development of a personal computer for 20 something years, and now it's taxing the development and adoption of an operating system that was written from scratch, using UNIX philosophy which Micro$oft neither invented nor indeed implemented.
Just like copyrights, patents are not worth crap to individual inventors because the chances of making a return on the investment with one, two, or even a hundred inventions are miniscule. So the inventors sign over their inventions to capitalists for either a small lump sum or a regular paycheck; and so do the artist with copyright, because it ultimately makes sense for them economically. The capitalists, on the other hand, are wielding tens of thousands of patents; just like the art producers are controlling significant proportions of the entire catalog. And when they control, say, 10% of all published ideas, they can finally make patents (and copyrights) pay. The art business is ugly, we all heard that, but the technology is uglier! With patents, in particular, the best way to maximize the return is by suing everyone who dares to innovate. The point being, everyone has to keep using the same shit invented 20 or 40 years ago, and pay, pay, and pay again to some bastard who neither invented nor encouraged invention [1], but simply invested into exclusive rights. This was true for the steam engine, and it is true for the latest, smallest, sexiest computers of tomorrow.
[1] Don't believe me? Look it up. Multiple studies were conducted, and no correlation was found between patent law strength on one hand and the rate of innovation on the other.
Most games are 95% art, 5% math, and 100% software.
Huh? that's some crazy statistics?
How much does math weigh compared to art?
How do you measure how much math there is compared to art? Is it the byte size of the executable (minus any embedded art) vs the byte size of the art?
I'm just confused how one could have any measure of either against each other...
My house is 99.99% bricks and mortar and 0.01% design... (using some arbitrary measure I just thought of)
A LOT of software has little to do with math.
Sorry, but ALL software is an expression of math..
Never happened. True story.
Not as long as Microsoft filesystems are the de-facto file systems for SD cards
Google and Android manufacturers are free to not include SD card readers. Duh.
Just because you won't ever invent anything doesn't make patents a bad thing. Patents just seem bad to you because you'll never invent anything.
It should be ILLEGAL for any company to make statements like "xyz is violating our patents" unless that statement contains details of which patents are being violated and which products/features/etc are doing the violating.
If Microsoft is forced to reveal in public which patents are being violated and how, it would allow the Linux community to evaluate that information and find prior art where it exists or find ways to make linux not violate the patent (e.g. kernel option to disable the relavent code or rewrite the code to not violate) and generally make it harder for MS)
Remember the TomTom case, evidence came out about a specific FAT patent related to long file names and TomTom just disabled that feature (since they didn't actually need it)
The common use case for USB sticks and such is (was?) to plug it into other people's computers, to quickly transfer files etc. There's no opportunity to install the driver there, nor would any sane person permit such.
A better question is, why not just use UDF? Windows supports it for both reading and writing, beginning with Vista (XP supported it read-only). OS X and Linux both fully support it. No patent fees.
A better question is, why not just use UDF? Windows supports it for both reading and writing, beginning with Vista (XP supported it read-only).
Because it isn't April 2014 yet, and Windows XP still supports it only read-only.