IBM Has Been Awarded An Average Of 24 Patents Per Day So Far In 2016 (qz.com)

Traditional companies continue to score a huge number of patents, reports Quartz. The publication deep dived into the patent filings to find which company has been awarded the most number of patents this year. According to its finding, IBM has been awarded 3,617 patents so far this year, whereas Samsung comes close with 3,032 patents during the same period. Behind these giants sit Google with 1,530 patents, Intel with 1,293, Qualcomm with 1,262, Microsoft with 1,232, and Apple with 1,060 patents. From the report: Although IBM's patent-producing power slowed somewhat in 2015, the number of patents it's received so far this year is up more than 13% compared to a year earlier. The company is in the middle of a painful reinvention, that sees the company shifting further away from hardware sales into cloud computing, analytics, and AI services. It's also plugging away on a myriad of fundamental scientific research projects -- many of which could revolutionize the world if they can come to fruition -- which is where many of its patent applications originate. IBM accounted for about 1% of all US patents awarded in 2015.

Comments

They dropped out of the top 20 in R&D in 2015

[Solandri]

First time in, well, almost forever that that's happened. Yeah IBM gets a lot of patents, but they also spend a lot in R&D. Have done so since the beginning of the 20th century. In 2015 their R&D spending dropped to $5.2 billion, which dropped them out of top 20 R&D companies in the world.

Here's how the others mentioned in TFA stack up:

IBM ........ $82b revenue ... $5.2b R&D ... 6.3% of revenue
Saumsung .. $196b revenue .. $14.1b R&D ... 7.2% of revenue
Google ..... $66b revenue ... $9.8b R&D .. 14.8% of revenue
Intel ...... $56b revenue .. $11.5b R&D .. 20.6% of revenue
Qualcomm ... $25b revenue ... $3.7b R&D .. 14.6% of revenue
Microsoft .. $87b revenue .. $11.4b R&D .. 13.1% of revenue
Apple ..... $183b revenue ... $6.0b R&D ... 3.3% of revenue

Despite Apple's reputation among lay people as an innovator, they're really not. They don't use much of their income on R&D. This is their first year cracking the top 20 in R&D spending, and as you can see the percentage they spend on R&D trails far behind the others.

Re:Who'd be an Inventor These Days?

[Dutch Gun]

The flood of patents also helps to cover of one of those "golden BB" types, you know, like one that manage to lock up something like hyperlinks or "playing a game via a remote server" (like a company I was previously working for got hit with) without a patent office clerk throwing it out as deserved for obviousness and prior art. What's tragic is that the companies that are actually innovating (like aforementioned company) are too busy actually *writing code* to bother with bullshit like patents.

These goddamned things are just like landmines. It's almost a certainty any piece of sufficiently complex code is going to infringe on a number of patents. I suppose the only good news is that with all the ridiculously (patently) obvious stuff that's getting patented right now, about 20 years from now, it's going to be damned hard to find any software concept that hasn't already been patented and expired. Or at least, that's what I'm telling myself to keep from getting too depressed about the situation.

Damn... software patents really need to go. It's ridiculous. I keep wondering when the system is going to start imploding under its own weight.