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Comment by riemannzeta | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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