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Comment by kagakuninja | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft directly stole their pivot table from a former employer of mine, Brio Technology, and their product DataPivot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brio_Technology

According to the CEO, Microsoft summoned him to Redmond and made an insultingly low offer to buy the company. They threatened to build their own product and put Brio out of business if he refused. He refused and MS later added pivot tables to Excel.

The article mentions Lotus, who apparently built a similar product around the same time. The Brio founders were involved with a company called Metaphor, and maybe some of the ideas were developed there...

Brio products shipped with a sample database, the contents of the CEO's wine cellar. That exact data could be seen on early Microsoft office boxes...

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Something similar happened to Stac Electronics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics

But Stac had patents, lawyered up, and sued Microsoft for patent infringement. Microsoft didn't lie down, but after a court ruled that both of them needed a license to ship products, Stac went to the largest OEM customers and offered a license. It was either take the patent license or not ship, and the pressure from the OEMs on Microsoft resulted in a settlement that was not terrible for Stac.

This is one of the best examples I know of how software patents can be good for competition.

Brio had a patent on their pivot table aggregation algorithm, perhaps Microsoft did something differently in their implementation. I've never used an Excel pivot table.

According to Wikipedia Brio got their patent in 1999, i.e. well after Excel got pivot tables.

OK, fair enough. We don't know how long it took to get approved. In theory they could have gone after MS. I vaguely remember that our rival Business Objects had some BI patents and sued us, and we sued them over pivot.

The patent in question appears to have been filed in 1996

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5915257A/en?oq=5915257

A quick search suggests that Excel pivot tables launched in 1993. So the Brio patent does indeed appear to have come later in time.

Note that although the patent indicates ownership by Oracle, the assignment history shows that it originated with Brio.

The settlement was alright, but Microsoft's inclusion of DoubleSpace still inevitably killed Stac (and even larger potential profits) as they were unable to pivot when the technology became unviable.

I think it is worth noting that these patents weren't good at all for competition. Stac Electronics proved to be in no way capable of competing with MS Excel, pivot tables are technically not that hard and the lawsuit might have stopped MS bringing them to a huge number of people faster.

They did nothing much, and if they'd done more they'd have retarded progress.

The fact that you clearly have no clue what business Stac was in rather undermines the argument you're trying to make.

Oh they made a disk compression program. Happily, the argument stays almost exactly the same - substitute NTFS for MS Excel. The reason I like that anti-patent argument is because, as far as I've seen, it applies to literally everything in software outside some ultra-niche applications of software that only handfuls of companies use.

The patents from that era were largely junk (famously, Amazon had a patent on having a button that you clicked to buy something). They're all for basic techniques that were going to get figured out one way or another. They were most useful as a tool for stamping on other companies that were figuring out the same techniques at about the same speed for the same reasons. IE, were no use at all for spurring innovation. The idea that MS should owe some company $100 million because they used a specific compression algorithm is serious because of the amount of money it cost them but otherwise stupid.

Arguably this, and similar cases, is what motivated Microsoft to become an aggressive patent filer. I know that at various times in my tenure there (99–13) that I was on teams where patent filing was encouraged

A similar story could be told about Steve Jobs and Apple. Anecdotally at least, Steve hired the patent litigators (who had represented Apple in a patent infringement lawsuit with Taiwanese MP3 maker Creative Technologies over the iPod) to patent the iPhone. But that was more targeted than the spray and pray approach.

> I was on teams where patent filing was encouraged

Cisco did/does the same.

> This is one of the best examples I know of how software patents can be good for competition.

Small companies and startups with products in the market (before existing incumbents have products) should be able to get software patents to defend their innovation.

Big companies should be able to have patents, but not use them against smaller players.

Patent trolls with no products in the market shouldn't be allowed to have patents.

Universities and university researchers should be able to have patents, but they should be forced to license at not-unreasonable terms to startups.

My thoughts on the matter, anyway. The point is to encourage innovation, especially by enabling small players bringing new stuff to market. Give them a small shield against the big incumbents.

As somebody who's been at this for a couple of decades, this strikes me as a rather well balanced view. What I can't understand is how no patent reform discussions have anything like this kind of balance. It's all "stronger patents" or "weaker patents." Nobody seems to understand how and when they work vs. don't work.

I am completely on board with the idea of Richard Stallmans of abolishing software patents BUT it is simply an ideal that I do not see ever happening on a large scale. The fact is that when it comes to business, they can help. It is just a shame when there is the potential to leverage them against smaller players.

Things that work on one scale for good can also be leveraged for bad on another scale.

> BUT it is simply an ideal that I do not see ever happening on a large scale

Too much money to be hoarded for it to ever happen.

What part did MS steal? The pivot table concept (as in summarising data by categories of rows and similar operations) existed for a really long time, so I'm guessing you're not referring to that?

Aren't you allowed to "steal" basically everything except exact code in software?

Didn't the supreme court rule in favor of Google vs Oracle that Google's use of the JDK API was fair use?

Wasn't there also a recent supreme court ruling that you can't patent non-novel math (algorithms)?

I'm not sure how you could be convicted of theft in software outside of literally stealing and reselling someone's non-open source code.

You could say they just reverse-engineered Brio's product, and therefore it wasn't theft.

But the presence of the Brio sample wine DB appearing on MS Office boxes showed that they bought a copy of DataPivot and used that DB when developing their clone. They didn't even bother hiding the evidence.

BTW, DataPivot was released in 1991, and the only other references I've seen for prior art are a Lotus product released about the same time.

I mean the concept existed on pen and paper or equivalent likely since we started tabulating numbers/money and doing math.

I was curious if by stealing you meant the interface to do it, the idea of putting it in a computer, the test data, or something else.

It's not clear that you understand the question you are answering. The "product" being referred to here is a centuries-old concept. There is nothing about pivot tables themselves that Microsoft would need to reverse engineer.

The comment you are responding to is not challenging your use of the word "stole" — it is asking you what exactly MS is alleged to have stolen, reverse engineered, or otherwise gleaned from your former employer.

What did they steal? The underlying tech? the name 'pivot table'?

The concept of aggregating categorized columns of data is not something Brio Technology invented.

Remember when Microsoft wanted to license CPM to IBM, but they didn’t own it, so they got someone to make a clone and licensed that to IBM?

Lotus Improv actually predates Brio's product. I remember clearly when Improv came out -- it was a really exciting breakthrough at the time. But the big problem IMO was that it wasn't part of Lotus 123. So when Excel added pivottables directly into the spreadsheet that made it vastly more useful (to me at least).

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