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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
I legitimately wonder how many (if any) of the features covered by the patents in question would not have been implemented in Android if not for the work of whoever filed the patent. If the answer is few or none, then patents are subtracting rather than adding value to society in this domain. If the answer is many, then there is at least an argument to be made.
(no sig)
However the test used in the patent systems worldwide tends to be along the lines:
"to one skilled in the art".
i.e. if it's blindingly obvious to someone who does similar work all day long, professionally, every day, then it shouldn't actually be patentable at all.
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
yep. But that's beside the point that software is math, and math isn't supposed to be patentable.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
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.
Xbox is still there only because M$ has deep pockets. The original Xbox lost billions, the 360 lost a couple more billions in its first two years on the market and then never made a steady profit, they can also hide the development expenses for the Xbox in their R&D division, not to mention the expenses for the development of the Xbox OS. The Xbox would not be a viable platform for anyone else, but M$. That's a fact.
> software is math
Games are art, and are software.
Most games are 95% art, 5% math, and 100% software.
Math CAN be done as software, but so can art and many other non-math things. Some software is math. A LOT of software has little to do with math.
> math isn't supposed to be patentable.
That's a common misconception, started and encouraged by people with a particular agenda. The rule in the US is:
The LAWS of nature, including mathematics, are not patentable.
Note that it's the basic laws that aren't patentable. Things that USE those laws are.
Gravity isn't patentable. An elevator is.
Momentum isn't patentable. A brake system is.
Division isn't patentable. eBay's feedback system is.
Light reflection isn't patentable. The way Blender simulates reflection is, if it's novel.
Technically it's only the implementation of an idea that is supposed to be patentable. With physical patents if you can accomplish the same thing by other means then it's fair game.
Somehow in software they've decided to allow patenting the *idea* of momentum when scrolling via swiping, or bounceback when you hit the end.
The equivalent to patenting physical implementations would be to allow protection of their *implementation* of an idea--and in the software world that implementation is already protected by copyright, so there's really no need for software patents.
I think "obvious to someone skilled in the art" is actually a lousy test. What's interesting is whether the invention will surface even without granting a state-sanctioned monopoly on it. If there is a million engineers worldwide working in a certain field, and an invention is non-obvious to 99% of them, there are still 10000 who could do something similar. To grant a single one of them a 20 year monopoly on it is hardly a win for society. It might have been different back in the olden days, when skilled engineers were actually rare.
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.
Rick Sherlund estimates. He doesn't know. Nobody knows except very senior management at Microsoft and Google.
The report also contains the following: "Sherlund believes Microsoft needs to spin out Xbox. He sees it as an orphan group at Microsoft that doesn't really fit with anything it's doing."
I guess he hasn't heard of the "Three Screens."
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.
its got netflix support
What doesn't? I think my hedge clippers have Netflix..
Have gnu, will travel.
Does it work without a Hedge Clippers Live Gold subscription?
crazy dynamite monkey
Microsoft's so called "IP" is being more valuable than their actual production of software. Microsoft is becoming little more than a huge IP and patent troll firm that has managed with their operating system monopoly, to bully the hell out of everybody including the Government of the US and companies like Apple and Sony into going along with the IP value bullshit.
It was Microsoft and others that created this situation. This overvaluation of IP is to a large extent responsible for the complete devaluation of the US economy and the rabid denuding of the core of the very economy, which was the skilled and diverse middle class work force within the US.
IDEAS are cheap the implementation of ideas is where value is added. If we do not change the patent system soon the economy of the US will completely collapse under the burden of paying for overvalued so called Intellectual Property Values. It distorts and corrupts the very core of an economy.
The English realized the folly of the Royal Monopolies and how they were strangling trade and enterprise, Queen Elizabeth the first in her latter years finally began to see the value of the small shop keeper, wine merchant and candle maker. The modern day Lords of IP like Microsoft and other need to be brought down a notch and the economy will blossom as a direct result of their dismemberment, the same way the break up of Standard Oil and US Steel did.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
I have never understood this. Windows users are used to installing drivers for each new piece of hardware. Why not bundle an ext4 driver? The device could even have a small FAT partiton (without the patented parts of FAT) that contains the driver for the larger ext4 partition.
Manufacturers have allowed the situation to exist.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Microsoft rarely takes allegations of infringement to court, they almost always prefer to settle for royalties or cross-licencing. That being said, the FAT patents have survived many legal challenge and their validity has been upheld.
http://news.cnet.com/Microsofts-file-system-patent-upheld/2100-1012_3-6025447.html
It's not trolling because Microsoft operates in the mobile market, designed the systems in question as a part of their market activities, and continues to use and license the systems in question as part of their market activities.
It's not simply a case of some unknown shell company purchasing broad and previously unknown patents in an attempt to squeeze settlements out major players. Everyone knows whom the FAT patents belong to, what the licencing terms are, and what will happen if they're not licensed.
The best selling smartphones in North America (the iPhone) do not have removable storage and do not use the FAT file system. Other phone manufactures are free to either implement FAT support as a matter of adding value and pay Microsoft the associated royalties, or leave it out.
Right, Microsoft is abusing their MONOPOLY, not patent trolling.
And there certainly are workarounds Google could implement. How about if USB-connected Android phones presented a small FAT12 (or ISO9660, or UFS) partition to the OS, which merely contained a (8.3 file-name) installer for the Windows EXT2 file system driver? That would result in widespread desktop support for EXT2 file systems, with Google using their mobile OS monopoly to push against Microsoft's desktop OS monopoly.
A few deals with the most prolific digital camera manufacturers, and Google could get them using EXT2 by default as well, putting Microsoft under-fire for not supporting EXT2. When forced to, Microsoft will adopt EXT2 as its own, just as they did with MP3s despite trying hard to push WMA, or TCP/IP long before that, or hundreds of other examples.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And yet Netflix is a no-go on any Linux/X11 systems, and it took them forever to cave-in and start supporting Android.
If I'm spending my money on video delivery, I'll give it to Hulu, since they are slightly less customer-rapey than Netflix.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It only has NetFlix support if you pay MS monthly. It's free on every other platform.
I am not even going to argue with you about "innovations in computing", what with the best OS to date written by a Finn. How about this instead:
Empirically, the nation with the strongest army is also the nation that is responsible for most of the innovations in computing.
Empirically, the nation with the largest inmate population (both absolute and relative to population size) is also the nation that is responsible for most of the innovations in computing.
Empirically, the nation with the highest healthcare costs (both absolute and relative to GDP) is also the nation that is responsible for most of the innovations in computing.
> Sorry, but ALL software is an expression of math.
Thinking about that for a minute, seems that statement his true, and almost meaningless such that it's misleading. Lara Croft is of course software, and pure art. No mathematicians were harmed in the making of this character. Music - rhythm, tone, and harmony is math. Although harmony is a mathematical phenomenon, you would be fooling yourself, and doing yourself a disservice, to say "eh, music is just math."
Gears and levers are an expression of division - arithmetic. Yes, E = MC2 and all of the universe is an expression of math. This is true. Once you decide that everything is math, though, the word "math" is a synonym for "anything"; the word loses it's meaning.
In order to discuss, and to think, meaningfully, we need words to have meaning. "Everything and anything is an expression of math", while technically true, leaves us unable to say anything useful about math. A useful definition, one that allows us to discuss and think clearly, is one where "math" refers to the work on mathematicians and engineers, distinct from the work if painters and composers. Harmony is a hidden expression of math, but Concerto #5 is art, not math. So it is with Lara Croft - art, not math, for any useful meaning of the word.
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)
For some reason filesystem drivers (be they physical, usb, network, etc) appear to be VERY hard to write for windows. I have yet to see a 3rd party filesystem driver for windows that wasn't either broken or unstable. This includes NFS, EXT, even encrypted volumes. The best we've been able to get in most cases is a 3rd party file manager that can read/write the partitions, almost none of them work with the default file browser.
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.
If MS decided to shut it all down, your single player disc based games will still work, but all the rest is gone.
All the rest? Microsoft shut down Xbox Live for the original Xbox, and as I understand it, same-screen multiplayer and System Link multiplayer kept right on working.
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.
faster-then-light communication patent
http://www.google.com/patents/US6025810
4wdloop
It's been my experience that 98% (or so) of patents are issued for non-novel ideals. It's merely a race to put a stake in the ground for future litigation (and mitigation of future litigation). What this has done is prevented or slowed firms, small and large, from innovating due to the threat of litigation. How much further ahead could we all be, technologically speaking, if ideas could be implemented without this black cloud hanging over people's heads? Instead we see the same regurgitated products, decade after decade, with with only incremental, and often unneeded or unwanted 'upgrades'.