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Comment by nextparadigms | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Microsoft has employees working on trivial things they can patent, so they can go after other companies with similar technology after that.

Is it possible to build something without infringing on some patent anymore? (even if nobody is suing you)

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     I wonder if Microsoft has employees working on 
     trivial things they can patent

I'll tell you how it works in all these big companies that are growing their portfolio:

(1) all engineers are encouraged to look for things to patent, while being actively discouraged to taint themselves by looking at other patents

(2) when an engineer thinks he has something patentable, he sends the description in his own words to a patent attorney that also knows engineering -- it's his job to translate the engineer's description into legalese.

(3) the internal patents office of the company examines the proposal, looking for prior art and declares it good to go, or sends it back to the drawing board.

(4) profit -- after a proposal is good to go, the engineer gets money, even though that patent request hasn't been approved yet by USPTO.

Now, the monetary reward isn't that high usually - it amounts to something like 1 or 2 salaries where I live, or something like that - but if you keep churning proposals, you can basically double your monthly revenue.

I bet that's one of the reasons why Microsoft Research exists.

Well its founder did leave Microsoft specifically to found a company that does nothing but patent trolling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures). Given the number of actual products that have come out of Microsoft Research (One the last time I counted) I'd say patenting things is its primary goal at this point

I'm sure that wasn't the original intent. But given that they have failed generally at commercializing their innovations, patent lawsuits are a good backup strategy and probably gives Microsoft's patent lawyers a good justification for their continued existance.

Plenty of MSR stuff has ended up in the hands of other groups and ended up in shipped projects. Just look at Wikipedia: their C# research (Polyphonic C# became Cw became Joins Concurrency), F#, Seadragon, Accelerator (pretty cool, BTW), freaking ClearType... the list isn't exactly short. Surface aside, they haven't produced commercialized products, but that's not the point.

Come on. This stuff is easy. Why the content-free troll?

F# is probably your only valid point though I'm not sure I'd call yet another functional programming language an innovation.

Seadragon is Zooming technology that is, at best, a decent demo at this point (and probably designed to be patented). For people who don't know what we're talking about: http://zoom.it

Accelerator I'd never even heard of which is probably because it was introduced in 2006 and no finished product has ever come of it.

Cleartype came out of the Microsoft e-books team which wasn't part of Microsoft Research to the best of my knowledge

So giving you F# that makes two products: Surface and F# for $9 billion dollars per year. So either your argument is those two products cost the majority of that money to maintain or I go back to my original point. Microsoft Research's primary function at the company is to patent things

Their work is used in the academic community. E.g. they have a suite for examining/debugging concurrency called CHESS which was used in a class I took in grad school and is related to and referenced by some of the research my (former) academic advisor professor does, which work is used by NASA to improve space program software.

Yes, and like their other MS Research projects it's licenced under the 'Microsoft Research Licence' which means that whatever modifications/enhancements you do to the code can only be used within this academic setting. HOWEVER, Microsoft themselves can use your modifications for whatever purposes they want, like sell them. Sweet deal...

As with any other software license (including the GPL), if you don't like the terms, don't use it.

Isn't it a bit misleading to put the MRL and the GPL in the same league? I agree with the "If you don't like the license, don't use the software" attitude, but the terms of the MRL are quite restrictive.

There are going to be plenty of things that come out of MS Research that people don't realize came from there (examples: PhotoSynth, Kinect). Expecting an exhaustive list is unrealistic. Furthermore, MS Research was founded over a decade ago when patent trolling was not as big a deal. It's pretty clear if you read about it that Bill Gates wanted to create the successor to the great post-war corporate research groups (ex: Bell Labs). I find the idea that Gates would really aspire to create a patent troll when there are much more exciting things to do with 1000 phds.

(Disclaimer: I work for MSFT, but now MS Research)

Well, Kinect owes quite alot to PrimeSense so I certainly wouldn't categorize it as a 'MS Research' product.

Balance. In seeking to lift one group you cast aside another hard working group of people. Certainly PrimeSense contributed much, but to discount the hard work of those in MS Research as something less by wrapping them in quotes only serves to despoil your message. You commit that which you wish to redress.

See what Johnny Chung Lee said of his time there for a more balanced look of the records.

Ehh, given how much Kinect relies on the functionality offered by PrimeSense, I'd think it would rather be UNBALANCED to claim it to come from MS Research.

The Kinect only relies on Prime Sense in the form of their hardware. All the algorithms and software are entirely developed by MS Research. This point is made more clear by the fact that Microsoft didn't acquire exclusive rights from Prime Sense but is instead banking on the superiority of their algorithms.

I've played around with the Kinect, and without Microsoft's code, all you really get from the hardware is a depth image (think an RGB image with distance from camera for each pixel instead of intensity). Everything else is developed by Microsoft, and it is not an easy feat.

Prime Sense developed their own software for pose detection and tracking, but it is inferior to the XBox360 implementation.

... and you also get stuff like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmC28cXWqLc

Don't get me wrong, I think the idea is really cool. The thing is that the 80's midi background track was just a terrible way to implement it.

ummm ... didnt Photosynth come from the SeaDragon acquisition and Kinect came from the PrimeSense partnership ?

OTOH, I think .NET/Mono are awesome pieces of language innovation.

EDIT: oops - didnt see that this was mentioned below.

Just a note: Cleartype was indeed invented by the ebooks team originally. But the algorithm was significantly improved with the help of John Platt at MSR. This is one of his early papers on the topic: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=68972

ClearType is "freaking" ancient http://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm

notice: everyone is dirty at this game, e.g. google's recent patent application for google doodle "A system provides a periodically changing story line and/or a special event company logo to entice users to access a web page."[1]

[1]http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

Sure, but they have to do this. I only consider it evil once a company starts suing other companies that they know can't compete based on patent portfolio size.

No no no NO!

This is wrong on so many levels. If you don't like the process, don't support it. Google is _not_ better than any other company out there. Sure, you have sympathies based on previous encounters and actions, but the goal is the same for every company: Make money.

You're saying that it's different if Google tries to patent something. It's not. There's no moral involved here, this is just plain business. Either you like patents or you don't. Hoping that 'the good guys' apply for lots of patents is crap.

This is a static view of a dynamic situation that can often result in a feedback loop.

Have patents but losing your monthly revenue? Why not sue others to keep your stock price afloat (instead of innovating your business or products)

The mere act of having such legal armaments creates a moral hazard.

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