Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

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Your comment poses as though Microsoft is a victim here, which they're not. Around 2012ish if I can remember correctly, Apple was throwing around lawsuits like crazy at everyone in the android ecosystem. The most notable I can remember was the one with Samsung. And the next one was HTC. I owned a HTC phone at that time and they made both Android and Windows phones that were very popular. Microsoft, following suit with Apple, started suing almost every major Android vendor to for basic patents[0]. I can't find the article, but their deal was that if you made Android phones, it means you had the means to build Windows phones as well. If you made a Windows phone AND an Android phone, the licensing was very reasonable, otherwise the vendors who made only Android phones would have to pay a lot in royalties to Microsoft.

I personally found this slimy and a very shitty way to sell Windows phones. Technologically, it's a great phone (I had both - Android and Windows from HTC). It was fast, fluid and almost didn't have any lags. Ethically speaking, I'm glad their sneaky sales didn't work out and Windows phone is dead.

[0] https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/microso...

Ironically, the patent licensing machinations have probably hastened Windows Phone's demise. IIRC at the time MS was making _billions_ (or at least hundreds of millions) off Android, more than Google itself. At some point MS execs must have thought, "why the hell do we need a phone that can't run Youtube"? It took some time for WP to die, but die it did, and I'm pretty sure it would not have died if succeeding in the mobile market was the only way to make money on mobile for MS. They would have poured billions into it, and it would take off. With the patents letting them suck the massive teat of Android they really had no skin in the game.

I worked at Google at the time, and I joked that if Apple were to go out of business and iPhones became unavailable, I'd have to go with a Windows phone. It was only partly a joke. WP had the consistency that Android never did, and never will have, and it had fluid, polished user experience even on the very low end.

Have you seen Oracle's patent lawsuit against Google over their misuse of Java in Android? Billions in damages if they win, and recent developments look like it could go that way. Google is already building an OS to replace Android.

Which part of java is the suit about? The runtime, the library or the language? Would kotlin be a possible escape hatch for Google here in the future?

Just the library. Oracle said Google reimplementing Java API is an infringement of their IP because function prototypes should be regarded as protected properties as well.

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