Drunk On Licensing Fees And Patents, Microsoft Has Become A Joke

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/this-title-is-patented-pay-me/

by bound008 • 15 years ago

37 10 15 years ago

lallysingh• 15 years ago

It's not all that different from when MS used to license OSs to vendors by the number of machines sold, total --- not the number that had windows on them.

Parasites.

mrkurt2• 15 years ago

Like ESPN licenses it's channels (and even ESPN3) based on the number of subscribers, not the people who actually tune into them?

beagle3• 15 years ago

No, it would be more like Toshiba would have to pay to ESPN based on number of televisions sold.

rosser• 15 years ago

If you're subscribed to a package that includes ESPN*, then ESPN gets its share of that subscription revenue. If you're not, they don't. The analog for MSFT's licensing practices would have ESPN getting a cut for every subscriber, whether or not their package included ESPN.

tzs• 15 years ago

Is it an industry requirement that in order to write about patents you have to not know anything about them? In particular, the author seems to not understand that a plaintiff claiming that their patent is being used by defendant to accomplish X does not mean plaintiff is claiming that their patent covers all possible ways to do X.

famousactress• 15 years ago

"How long until Microsoft is making more money on patent licensing than from their mobile unit? Serious question. Maybe they already are."

I'd imagine there's an excellent chance that they already are. Sounds much cheaper to keep a stable of lawyers around than hundreds of engineers, testers, support staff, and marketing folk.

If you think the margins on selling software are high...

api• 15 years ago

The latest trend in business: make money by creating no value whatsoever!

Actually, in my experience this is the MBA ideal. From the pure bean-counting perspective, the ideal business would be something that just made free money. No staff, no overhead, etc.

acabal• 15 years ago

Siegler is surprised that MS is doing something greedy and underhanded? Is he even aware of MS's history from not even 10 years ago?

Laments• 15 years ago

Before we derail too hard on this article, I would like to take a moment to point out that there's an article ranked higher about how Apple's suing Amazon over the term "App Store"... not like they've sued Microsoft over the term, too. (Also on HN somewhere.)

So, it's not just MS who sues -- but lest we forget, TC needs to be provocative and incite us to be persnickity. That's some high-quality bloggin'.

Drunk On Licensing Fees And Patents, Microsoft Has Become A Joke

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