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Topic: Microsoft and VCSY
I've added a long dissertation on my reaction to this. It's a rant plain and simple. Just can't control the overflow when I see this sort of strategy play out. May 25, 2007, 12:01AM EST
Linux Foundation Fires Back at Microsoft
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2007/tc20070525_325967.htm?campaign_id=yhoo
If you earned $34 million a day from Windows and Office, you too would try to spook the market with patent threats
by Jim Zemlin
excerpts
Last week, Microsoft (MSFT) initiated what can only be described as a rather bizarre public-relations campaign in which they alleged that Linux and Open Office may violate hundreds of the software maker's patents. ...the most intriguing aspect of this aggressive maneuver: a glimpse of a threatened giant struggling to keep a grasp on its empire. ...the story really isn't about patents at all—it's about a rational actor trying to protect its privileged position.
In the time it will likely take you to read this article, Microsoft will have made $500,000 in net profit. ...majority of that profit comes from its Windows operating system and Office suite of business software. ...the two product lines most threatened by Linux operating systems and Open Office.
Patent Wars Shortchange Customers
...If you were making $1 billion a month, what would you do? Perhaps engage in rhetoric and hyperbole to generate some old-fashioned FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt)? Just looking at the numbers, it's easy to see that even if the scare campaign merely delays a customer's migration from Windows to Linux by a single day, Microsoft is $34 million dollars better off.
...Microsoft is, above all, a rational actor. ... hesitant to instigate a patent war, as it has too much experience with the downside of such litigation. Just ask Microsoft about its MP3 patent dispute, ...to pay $1.5 billion to Alcatel-Lucent (ALU).
...a patent war guarantees only one sure outcome: The customer loses. Customers want choice and innovation. That's why open-source is winning. ...embrace open-source to bolster competition in the marketplace. Competition will make us all better. Even Microsoft.
Reform the Patent System
The Linux Foundation does believe the current software patent system is problematic. The superpowers have their stockpiles. The trolls have their stashes. Rather than spurring innovation, which is of course the raison d'être of the patent system, today's patent games will divert dollars away from research and development in the U.S. Instead, those dollars will fund innovative activities in countries that have better things to do with their time and money than litigate.
That said, we are also rational actors working within an existing system. Touch one member of the Linux community, and you will have to deal with all of us. Microsoft is not the only—perhaps not even the largest—owner of patents in this area. Individual members of the Linux ecosystem have significant patent portfolios. Industry groups, such as the Open Innovation Network and our own legal programs at the Linux Foundation, aggregate our membership's patents into an arsenal with which to deter predatory patent attacks. With our members' backing, the Linux Foundation also has created a legal fund to defend developers and users of open-source software against malicious attack. We don't expect to but, if needed, we will use this fund to defend Linux.
In 2005, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith called on Congress to reform the patent system for software, stating reforms were needed to curb "abusive litigation." We ... call on Microsoft to work with the Linux ecosystem to restore confidence in the patent system by making sure they are issued only for truly unique, innovative, and novel functions that advance the state of the art.
...stop engaging in FUD campaigns that only serve to undermine confidence in the U.S. intellectual-property system. Instead, please work with us to make the patent system tighter, more reasonable, and efficient for everyone in the software business.
Zemlin is the executive director of the Linux Foundation.
end article
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Shouldn't that should read "Patent Wars Shortchange (OUR) Customers".
How about "Reform the Patent System (Before These Little Critters Eat Us Alive)"?
May I paraphrase you Mister Zemlin? "Hey Microsoft. Quit yer bitchin' and work on real developments of your own or pay the rightful owners of the ideas instead of trying to cut the corners." Is that what you're saying Mister Linux? Heck. I could write magazine articles. I could talk out of both sides of my butt just as well. Watch:
"Customers want choice and innovation".
Innovation means "alternative applied" doesn't it? Can anyone explain what Microsoft has innovated in the past five years as regards XML based integration that tops what IBM can do in XML web-based systems? And that was what LongHorn was supposed to be and what everyone is screaming to acquire. Why another year? Why another two? Why another day?
If the scare campaign merely delays a customer's migration from Windows to Linux by a single day, Microsoft is $34 million dollars better off.
"If you earned $34 million a day from Windows and Office, you too would try to spook the market with patent threats..." Sure I would but I wouldn't try to steal them... the markets that is.
"...the story really isn't about patents at all—it's about a rational actor trying to protect its privileged position..." Rational? It's rational for a CEO to rant about suing his clients because they might have something "the other guy has"? God forbid! It's then rational for folks to try to ram something through the nearest congressman to stick something to the wall to protect their "apparently" cheating asses? Rational. HA HA. Rational. Now, THAT's rich internet.
"...today's patent games will divert dollars away from research and development in the U.S...." It certainly siphoned $20Billion shareholder dollars from Microsoft treasure pile, didn't it. Did it produce anything? beyond furtive actions and double-speak and opacity.
"Instead, those dollars will fund innovative activities in countries that have better things to do with their time and money than litigate." where patents don't mean squat and if you're there first with the biggest wagon you can take the lion's share even if it was based on someone else's ideas. Wasn't that what started World War I? Wasn't that also what started World War II? Yeah. Great idea. We REALLY want to use the kind of system the "other part of the world" has used way back past the Hapsburg rule when, if your family fortune built a road, you owned the town, by God. At least that's what they SAID God said.
Serf's up! Looks like it's going to have to be pitchforks and axes all over again.
You can sue a ham sandwich in the Newnited States. It doesn't mean you've moved anything. It doesn't mean you'll get anywhere. Some judges are worth their salt. Other judges wouldn't make good jerky. It simply means the democratic republic of America (statehood for Mexico! and throw in one of them cute little islands while you're at it, ok?) say somebody who's been deemed to have proven to an established and credible examination regime the value of their invention has the right to challenge others on the basis of infringement and theft of said intellectual property.
The laws of this country allow for a little guy to challenge an incorrectly credited origin of "the big idea".
The preferences of "others" established in the businesses addressed by the invention disciplines is for the big idea to belong to everybody... everybody big enough to dominate the market.
There's a problem here in such an example of VCSY v MSFT. VCSY has been forced to keep a low profile in presenting their intellectual properties since 2001. The nagging question is... why has Microsoft been keeping a similar low profile from the similar time period... often missing astonishing coincidental alignment by only a few days.
We know what makes a little guy have to keep a low profile and it makes sense. We don't know what makes a large guy keep a low profile and what the big guy says is doesn't make sense. Not at all.
What does that mean to you?
We always heard that the oil barrons a hundred years ago (things never change do they?) and manufacturing typhoons were 'greedy' because they wanted to swallow up all the small producers.
How else does a guy get his fair share of the big idea other than to say Nope. Not going to be absorbed into a scabbed wallmart of the mom and pops pieces.
Yes. We are the little guy.
What should be done with the little guy who's demonstrated he can do more than the giant? What should you do with somebody smarter and more dextrous... just smaller?
Break them down? Is that what it's about? Wait them out while you make everyone fear you're going to kick their furry ass? Starve their children because they can't afford to do what you're doing out in the open because they know you're just waiting for you to jump out there and then they can field their copies out in the open in order to compete?
There is a defensible technological position Microsoft has been maintaining pressure to keep these technologies from coming to the fore in order to stretch out the implementation and adoption (make you spend more and more money in the adoption lawyers office than making the technology work in your business) so a "competing" company would go belly up and they could appropriate their "similar technology". Doesn't sound unusual for them? Doesn't that make a ding on your brass ringer?
Can you defend Microsoft's (and other's) positions to not produce productive and sold tools since 2001 given the ease with which XML may be cobbled into a useful implementation? The Longhorn Revisited outfit put the original LongHorn concepts together in seven months. SEVEN MONTHS. Microsoft's been working for seven years and they're not even close. "A couple more years. Honest." is all you will get now when all they ever did was talk abotu it back in the "good old days".
What are you people, fools? Are you "challenged"? Do you think maybe this LongHorn Revisited thing is a fluke? Nope. Not a fluke. A result of the thecnology Microsoft once used then stopped for a time.
What should happen? Should these guys who've got LongHorn working before Microsoft deserve a shot at the brass ring or does the "idea" belong to Microsoft. Have at it arguing that one because you'll quickly get to the position of the dog most successful in chasing his tail; he often ends up past the raisons and into the nuts.
Walmart got visibly screwed by Microsoft in the most recent CNBC view of Walmart's CIO and their "system". They were supposed to be able to do all this interconnection and interoperation of systems by this latest upgrade, weren't they? Really look at the CNBC report, Mister Technology USA, and tell me what Walmart has with Microsoft behind the Linux architecture?
State of the art my puppy's breath. I saw people getting feeds of RFID chains (no wait that's not right. they have cameras reading the bar codes. I didn't hear anything about RFID in that bit.) Eeeek 666! it's a freaking cult with antlers. Bullwinkle's version of Rocky. The one thing I can't figure out is how Bullwinkle got the hat on his head over those antlers. Did the horns grow through the holes in the hat because you can't stretch a hat over those antlers? HA only in america.
There's a battle between Creflo's law of wise decision making and Oprah's law of attraction. One a systemic construct from the old testament empowerment (or at least enabled) of man, the other a Sumerian borne system of 'we are the worldism gone mega spirit'.
THERE! I'm a freaking religion and culture editor. But if I don't do my own searching for the truth, I am never going to amount to anything more than the guy (or lady, ma'am) that's standing there in the entrance way saying howdy. This guy has got over on the system to a small degree. He does what any idiot can do on his own front lawn and moved it into the mainstream of life's funnels for pay. The only thing is, it's not original enough and Walmart is paying him by the hour while his job is a prime piece of real estate in the promotion of their Business Plan (re: xxx - confidential).
Well, the legal system is often the only funnel a little guy can find. And if his concerns and indications point out something that stinks like a gray whale washed up on pebble beach, what should we do? How about dumping a billion stickups on highway one?
No, not Pescadero, you nitwit, the real pebble beach in Mountaray. The government gave some fool the right to park his fat carcass on a prize piece of real estate and actually charge big bucks for people to play a game where a guy hits this ball with a stick and tries to knock it in a hole before the other guy's. Hell. I CAN DO THAT! Geez lewis a clark can poke a pebble in a gopher burrow and all of a sudden you got this really sweet place to build a house and this b-rabbit wanna be gets to make people pay to do ONLY THIS ONE TING ON THAT PROPERTY? Where does it say that? Property laws? Oh. Ok. Never mind. Didn't know you guys were allowed to carry those. What's the battery life on something like that per use? Like what, a football team?
5 people killed in New Orleans and all because one guy had something that belong to the other guy and there was some force (so how's the competition between you and Lefty Lagure? on a scale of zero to ten, I would give it a 9mm.) applied intended to protect the treasure. In some businesses they basically depend upon the laws being weakly applied in their particular area of operation.
| ...sales were good last year, despite ongoing and continuous pressure from the disaster befalling the area per Hurricane Katrina (ref. FT- Report On Crime Statistics as Part of Income Distribution in Storm Ravaged New Orleans.) promotion of the sales of our goods (BMB aka Black Market Boo Productions, Inc. Re; Delaware "license".) was brisk. While collection of accounts receivable remains a problem we recently employed the services of consultants to provide remediation to the problem. We feel confident our activities will be rewarded by further increase in revenue. | |
Who's crazy this year? It all depends on how far "within the law" people are forced to go that portends and pretends how far outside the bounds they would go. THAT is what makes mom and pop swallow their pride and their mortgages and seconds and thirds into a bloated sense of 'empowerment' as an 'associate'.
It works for Walmart because it's a community applied. But, when does a corporation become a community? I submit the answer to that question will be very evident within the bounds of the activities predicted by VCSY technology (SiteFlash, XML/Web collection, Emily pending) for empowerment of the little guy as opposed to protection of the treasure amassed by non-monopoly and great competition. When patent laws protected old man Hughes' patents for drill bits, that wealth became a source of innovation that went a long way toward saving America's butt through innovation through oil production during World War I and through technology during World War II.
If we had used the Microsoft pardagim as our model we would have waited until the Japanese were in San Francisco and then hold a feng shui conference to see if we would undermine the 'encroachment'. If Microsoft were out in the world of real competioin, their 2 out of 7 'ain't bad' ratio for successful 'competition' score is a bit dismal.
Twenty billion dollars in R&D over a three year period and still nothing to show for it after two years passing? Been there, junior. watched it all unfold right here on the new improved spoofolator. So don't give me any of your lip, wisenheimer or we'll take a tree branch and woop you into submission. 'Yes mister pinkenshear.'
I do appreciate the calls for patent reform as a remedy for silly litigation as it does place a crippling scab on the business and social environment. The Pilgrims annexed all lawyers to an island in the early days of this countries anglo existence. Apparently somebody loaned them a few boats.
I definitely agree there's a problem in American IP. How does a little company like VCSY cow something as big as Microsoft and there not be something "wrong" with the American patent system? But let's consider the entire range of issues beyond what Mister Carnegie and Mister Rockefellor ... er... I mean, whoever is the latest to fill the pantheon chair of biggest and wealthiest boards etcetera etcetera etcetera.
And now here are the Linux people chiming in and say "Yeahhh... quit picking on our brother, big guy... uhhh... I mean, little guy. You had your chance when the open job positions went out. Thanks for your contribution."
Isn't it funny a common practice on software development teams is for management to say 'Don't think about the origin of ideas you have. We'll take care of the patent research and IP research. You guys just innovate your little hearts out.'? All companies say they do that to learn and innovate. Some demonstrate they intend to do quick end runs around those who have been working on similar ideas for years. Some press the advantage of size and dominance to press the originator into a compromised position... closer to the ground with no headroom.
Isn't it funny every engineering company (that I know of at least) owns all the ideas you discover while on their time. Why doesn't the little guy own the ideas he discovered in his time? He does? How? Through the patent system? You mean the one the larger players want to get rid of? No? Is that what we're saying Mister Microsoft? MISTER Linux?
Is this what's called "being bufalloed"? All the bulls step out shoulder to shoulder with the pointy things on their heads pointed out toward the wolf. The pointy hooves of each beast must stand the ground beyond the herd's collective head and the out-turned horns. Each fiercely independent beast must press up to the next animal's belly rib to rib to form a cage to keep out the wolves advance. Each soft underbelly is fended by the hooves in front and the large main of hair. Call it an obfuscation perimeter making the wolf bend lower to the ground... a vulnerable place for a wolf.
Dividing is what conquering is about. You go for the strongest and make the flanks face inward. That's a cool wolf tactic. Confront the leader and the other independent members of the herd turn inward to face the threat. Even though there is dire competition between male buffaloes, the enemy of one's enemy is one's friend.
But, when they each turn in to meet a specific aimed threat, the concave arch of distributed resistance turns convex and it's easy to eat out the supporting ends, collapsing the herd into stampede. Beyond that is where the bull$#!@ is and after that, nice tender baby buffalo and mama-fat storerooms for the winter.
... and so it goes and so it goes and where the egghoes no-one knows.
I saw a kid fall off a bike yesterday. Heroic little guy. He'll be getting a healing scab over that knee (trying to push out the embedded rocks he didn't have a microsoft ... I mean mikerscope to see where the rocks were, but they were there allright) to enable a protective layer of goo and ugy crap to cover what good stuff was going on underneath. It's only natural. I'm sure, being a little man and all, he'll do what his Mom says. But he really wants to rip that scab off and see what's under there. Ooooh and goooo and no more itch for a while.
When they put a wall frame up and it's not yet stable, you put a "scab" on it to keep it from sagging to the side. You stick a two by four across a partially constructed wall. That's a scab.
Like when you bring in workers who are willing to get insulted (or shot... like Louie says. It's your choice.) for crossing a plant entrance being picketed by "the union", the stalwart bastion of 'we's all in it together'.
A scab. Some want it to stay there. Some want to rip it off. I say go with the more learned proposition to 'leave it there; it's protecting the wound from fresh injury' than the kid's desire to pull it off irresponsibly.
Let's see, it says here that Microsoft makes thirty something million dollars each day they can hold on to their treasure. That's all they have to do is hold on to their treasure and they will be happy. And how do they hold on to their treasure? Day by day. If they can delay an unpleasant outcome for one day they save thirty something million dollars.
That sounds like a whole lot when you have nothing. I can't even imagine that. But it's real and it belongs to the guys who had the idea first and they were protected by... ignorance on IBM's part and arrogance on CP/M's part. I remember that. I worked in the computer electronics industry then. What were you doing then? Wetting your tricycle? Do it in the bushes like a real man, dammit and learn something from an old codger, junior.
I petition the common man to vote and tell me if a guy who thought something up and is the originator of the idea and did the work to flesh it out and registered for codified recognition and establishment and was forced to not talk about his stuff because somebody was pushing him around... and all...
Mister Microsoft, uhhh, what guy? THAT guy. The guy that's pushing the you around? I don't see nobody but a seven year old kid with a peashooter. It's a blowpipe? Dude, look. Come sit with Mother Mary from the Conjoined Dominational Heaten and Brethren Church of the Epockelyptic and she'll get you some bread and water. Bless you brether. Tell our sister (yours and "mine" metaforickly) Jimmie Jones says hello. Here's my number. Don't let me down. Hooray for the little guy, right?
Posted by Portuno Diamo
at 8:28 PM EDT
Updated: Friday, 1 June 2007 2:55 AM EDT
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