Regardless if what reputation Microsoft may carry when it comes to the originality of its software, there’s no question that the company brings a lot of technology to both businesses and end users.
Yesterday, Microsoft was proud to announce that it had been awarded its 10,000th U.S. patent. The achievement unlocked is likely a result of the $8 billion a year Microsoft spends on R&D, more than any other company in the industry. Outside the industry, Microsoft ranks fourth among companies receiving the most U.S. patents, with just over 2,000 patents in 2008.
“Most technology companies, Microsoft included, have been increasing their emphasis on IP in recent years, trying to derive greater business value from their intellectual assets,” says Bart Eppenauer, chief patent counsel, who oversees Microsoft’s patent portfolio. “One way to value a patent portfolio is to look at the quantity of patents it contains. Another way is to look at the influence the portfolio has on others.”
There is an argument that, as much as patents protect and reward innovation, it also restricts new implementations and ideas. Microsoft did point out in its announcement that since late 2003, the company shifted “from a defensive posture to a proactive, collaborative one” when it comes to licensing its patented technologies.
“Patents are the currency of innovation,” says Eppenauer. “What we’re seeing more often in the past several years is that patents and IP are now serving as bridges to collaboration through licensing and other technology collaboration. … Let’s face it, the days of the self-contained, go-it-alone company are over. This is especially true during the current economic downturn. Open innovation is more critical than ever in today’s business world.”
The milestone patent is U.S. Patent No. 7,479,950 and Microsoft’s Surface technology. The patent is for a surface to recognize an object that is placed on top of it, which then triggers an associated program or files to open. For example, one could place an associated souvenir from a trip on the surface, which would then start a slideshow of photos collected during travel. Even the orientation or motion of the souvenir could change behavior, such as slideshow speed.
Microsoft also gave the following example as another potential use for the surface technology: “When the teenage son places his keys on a surface computer, the technology recognizes them and automatically brings up sports scores, his playlist and his homework assignment. Later, when mom puts her purse on the surface, the computer can automatically bring up several predetermined items, including her daughter’s soccer game schedule and maps with driving directions to the away games.”
Curtis Wong, one of four co-inventors of the patent from Microsoft Research, said, “Surface computing gives people instant access to digital information in a new way. The goal of this patent is to make the interaction between the physical and virtual worlds a little more seamless.”
At least we can agree on couple of points. The first is that experiment conducted in USSR and the rest of the Eastern Block was very far from the original communist and socialist ideas. The main problem was that those ideas were never theoretically developed and if there was time, we could found the theoretical problems, instead of destroying the life of millions and millions of people. Only the people who lived under the regime knew and undarstand that. There was very popular joke that I learn in Moscow. I will try to translate it for every one.
"In late 80's the soviet scientists able to resurrect the mummy of Lenin. The moment Lenin woke-up he demanded the paperwork to examine the progress of USSR. So they gave him all documents and left him alone to work. He never appeared for days so the communist elite enter his room to see what was going on, but Lenin was missing. The only thing they found was a note. 'I am back at Avrora, and I am starting the revolution all over again. Lenin'"
My biggest problem is that I see the same problems here in USA. The career politicians are corrupted and they are failing to do their duty at the same time people are failing to hold them accountable for that. I will hate to see USA destroyed because we were not able to learn from mistakes of others. That is what smart people do.
The second point that we agree is that smart people and inventors should be rewarded, but we radically differ in our approach. This is the best part of USA as long we can find away to maintain constructive dialog.
About the open-source software I think you are misunderstanding the process. You are correct that some projects are run by small core of people and they can make or break the project. But here where the agility of the OSS is coming to play. If you disagree you can take the current source and fork it. You can modify it the way that will work for you or your selected business. For example Sun exercises strict control over the OpenOffice and many programmers are turn-off by that. As result different version of the OpenOffice called Go-OO exists. That is what most people include in their distributions. Other OSS project that had completely different style is MySQL. For many years they had dual-licenses, Commercial and GPL. But they had found out that it would be simple to drop the commercial license. Now the MySQL server is distributed only under GPL and they have been very successful. The same happen to Qt library; recently Nokia changed the license from GPL to LGPL. This is going to allow development of commercial software and the company can publish only portion of their source and continue to improve the Qt library. That is how both, commercial companies and OSS communities can benefit from each other. Canonical is trying to develop what you call mainstream Linux distribution and they are getting a lot of criticism, but at the same time they are one of the most popular distribution. At the same time the people that need special distribution can find it or build it. Here the efficiency of the OSS is coming. If you have a special case you can take core from existing projects and build only your component instead of re-inventing the wheel every time. That is why programmers that understand OSS are in high demand right now. If you are OSS programmer, you can move from one company to other and your skills will apply. The company doesn’t have to spend time to train you. The company can have you working on their project without wasting time and money on usual overhead. Many companies are realizing that, including Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft has removed ridiculous restriction that you can not use their development software to produce OSS and recently they have contributed to Moonlight, OSS implementation of Silverlight. Some people argue that all software should be OSS. This is nice idea, but is not practical. In some cases more efficiently from business point of view to be close source and this should be left to the company to decide. The business models around OSS are very young and they need time to mature. The only people that are scared by OSS are the people that don't want to change. Those people are using their money and power to prevent the change, but they will fail in the long run. Do you really believe that MS will work so quickly to fix Vista, if Linux was not around and some OEM vendors have not started to distribute Linux? Like it or not but Linux is becoming real competition for MS. In fact the power of OSS is just started to show. I bet you that you have at least one device that runs OSS and most of the software will be OSS in the future. Some companies are all ready taking notice of that. Sun is building OpenSolaris. Nokia is in process of opening the source of the Symbian OS. IBM, HP, Novell, Red Had, Intel all are working together to improve the Linux kernel and yet they are big competitors to each other. Recently IBM was sued by patent troll. IBM never announced it publicly, but they have received many documents from other OSS companies. As result the IBM won the case in such way that all OSS companies are protected form this kind of racket. That is why I support OSS. We also agree that many companies are not working in the free-market competition instead they are looking and promoting mercantilism. Those companies are looking to eliminate competition by abusing their monopolistic power. MS was found guilty of doing that. Those companies are using temporary granted monopolies through patents to block competitors and in the process stifling innovation. That is why I oppose current patent regime. There should be better way of protecting inventors. For example instead of granting monopolies to one company why we don't have patent that require to pay tax to use it and portion of tax to be paid back to inventing company or individual. That way no one can stop implementation of that idea. If the idea is implemented by many companies the inventor will receive more royalties. That way the company that provide best implementation can win the biggest market share and profit. If any one implements the idea with out paying the patent tax will commit tax fraud and the government should step in. The best part would be that other companies will police that and we don't need extra government expenses. I believe that we do not need monopolies, even if they are temporary only.
Best regards,
SAL-e
That's way false. Look back to some of the greatest thinkers in American history. Ben Franklin and Joseph Priestley. Anytime they came up with an idea or invention they quickly shared their discoveries and ideas with others and encouraged them to use it. When Priestly invented soda water (carbonated water) he shared it with everyone. That's how it was back then. He didn't try to make a dime off it, and wanted to share everything he came across. That was typical of the information system back in those days. Knowledge was shared, cause Priestley believed that good ideas should be shared so it grow and can be improved on. Ben Franklin, and Jefferson both shared those values of sharing information.
They innovated and improved society way more than anyone that I've known of. Imagine what we could have been accomplished if information was shared now like it was back then.