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Comment by tpatke | Hacker News Reader

When I think of IBM, I still think of consultants and guys in blue suits. ...but more than anyone else out there, these guys are building the future.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/30/embargo-ibm-develops-inst...

http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/14/ibm-stores-bits-on-arrays...

I hate to think what their patent portfolio looks like.

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Its patent portfolio is huge -- the biggest in the world. They have registered the most patents per year for, like, the last 10 years. More than 5,000 per year! (Next biggest is Samsung and MS, which have averaged around 2k-3k per year, I think).

How awesome would it be it we just could hit delete on the hole shity patent db.

Your horrible spelling aside, I wouldn't mind seeing the patent system suffer an irreversible data corruption, along with a fire destroying all hard copies.

A forced reset, as it were.

If IBM didn't think that it would be awarded patents for work like this, why would they bother to do the research in the first place?

Surely you don't think the only reason people do research and advance science is due to hope of compensation?

That might not be the only reason for people, for companies however it would be silly to spend money without hoping to get it back somehow.

You don't need patents to create and execute big ideas. As a company or anything else.

As I said, this is a dream (and a pretty silly one at that). I can still hope though

The alternative to patents is secrecy. I think the patent system was originally introduced because it was deemed superior to make ideas public, but limit their commercial usability.

Problem being that the patent system (much like the copyright system) is irrevocably hosed.

Yes, without patents nobody is ever gone invent anything again.

I worked for IBM for a year before Uni. Great place to work, but there was a joke that if you sneezed, they would patent it. They offered bounties for any granted patents, even if they were never used.

Shake that preconception! I can say with confidence that in the Hursley UK site (where us tech types are) you'd struggle to even find someone in a suit.

It's true that IBM does incredible research, but their results never seem to break into mainstream.

SQL came out of IBM research and its quite mainstream.

They do end up into the mainstream. IBM is not a B2C company, though, so there is no hype behind the unveiling of a new shiny gadget. So the tech community at large seriously underestimates IBM's contributions to the field.

IBM was the first company to successfully release a commercial USB flash drive back in 2000.

Ever heard of the PC?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer

I believe IBM was the first company to use GMR in hard drives.

And even hard drives, after all they invented them, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER

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