Barnes & Noble Urges U.S. to Probe Microsoft on Patents

bloomberg.com

All true; probably all legal.

Microsoft has been doing this for as long as they've been around. Used to work at a hardware vendor (desktop boxes with a proprietary OS). We paid $12 to Microsoft for every box shipped, because they had Intel processors and might conceivably one-day run Excel (called Multiplan back then).

It is indeed a new low for Microsoft to be patent trolling on an open source operating system which is based on the linux kernel.I wonder what Bill thinks about this.

Also I really dont understand how a company which has tens of thousands of engineers has to do cheap stuff like this to generate revenue.I know a lot of smart people who (unfortunately) chose to work for ms and I wonder why Microsoft is not using its talent pool.

In a [1991] memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” Mr. Gates worried that “some large company will patent some obvious thing” and use the patent to “take as much of our profits as they want.”

source: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/opinion/09lee.html

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