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ah, but reputation matters here... you don't want to have a reputation for being easy money for patent trolls. Additionally, as google doesn't seem to be a pa

by lsc 16y ago

ah, but reputation matters here... you don't want to have a reputation for being easy money for patent trolls. Additionally, as google doesn't seem to be a patent troll, it's probably also in their interest to set legal precedents that weaken software patents. I mean, obviously, this doesn't mean 'always fight' but it's another value you need to punch in to your equation, one weighing in on the 'fight' side. In my business, a similar example would be the money I spend on running an aggressive abuse desk. Running a less-aggressive abuse desk would be cheaper, both in the work it takes and in customers I've lost, at least in the short term. But in the long term, /because/ I have succeeded in making my service a hostile place for spammers, my abuse complaint rate is much lower than it would be otherwise. for a while, another VPS company rented a few servers from me... and in spite of being something like 1/60th of my size, they produced more abuse desk work than the rest of my customers combined. I believe, because I have an aggressive abuse desk. (I mean, there are other costs... I've lost at least one legitimate customer I know of, because he was compromised and his box was spewing ssh attacks over the network. I shut him down with an email notice, the email went to the shut down box, so he never got it. ) my point is that there are real business reasons to fight that sometimes go beyond the immediate results of that fight.

houseabsolute 16y ago
Maybe there is some space for a 3.1 step where you factor in the benefit from fighting even if you end up losing, but I doubt there is going to be one nearly as often as your VPS example.
- lsc 16y ago
  in this case, they'd only get the benefit if they won; assuming that if they lost they'd have to pay the other guy's court expenses /and/ a license, it would make loosing more costly, but it would also make the win more valuable, possibly out of proportion to how much more costly it makes losing.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
loewenskind 16y ago
>ah, but reputation matters here... you don't want to have a reputation for being easy money for patent trolls. Giving into Oracle (who owns Sun's patents which were vast and probably only topped by IBM in the industry) is hardly going to give one the reputation for being patent troll bait. And doing what's best for the rest of the industry obviously isn't something Google cares about.
- cnlwsu 16y ago
  > doing what's best for the rest of the industry obviously isn't something Google cares about. I am sad that over the last year or so this has gone from a quiet fact of it being a corporation to a in-your-face "Google: do no evil unless you can make money". I guess each generation needs a company to fantasize about being a righteous white knight.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    I never bought into the whole "do no evil" bit, but I sure got sick of dealing with the army of people who did.
    - lsc 16y ago
      It's interesting to watch google... they are actually handling themselves /much better/ than I would expect them to... but I think there are solid business reasons for this. Google makes money because it uses data most of us consider private to serve up ads for us. If enough people stop trusting google, they will no longer be able to do this. Consumer trust is integral to their business. and there will always be tension, as to make money, they need to use at least some of that data to serve us ads, and some of us will take offense to that. I mean, really, there's no way they can run gmail profitably without doing things that I feel violates my privacy. Now, in the short term, they could earn boatloads of money by violating this trust in a more direct manner... but in the long term, it would kill them. I think that ever since they went public there has been a constant war there, short term profits, vs long-term viability. My own personal expectation was that this trust of google would not have lasted much past their IPO... it has lasted much longer than that. Personally, I find it odd that now that this trust is eroding, people seem to be complaining more about net neutrality than about google pushing the limits of what they can do with our private data. Of course, I'm a hosting provider, and thus oppose regulation of my market.

by lsc 16y ago

houseabsolute 16y ago

Maybe there is some space for a 3.1 step where you factor in the benefit from fighting even if you end up losing, but I doubt there is going to be one nearly as often as your VPS example.

lsc 16y ago
in this case, they'd only get the benefit if they won; assuming that if they lost they'd have to pay the other guy's court expenses /and/ a license, it would make loosing more costly, but it would also make the win more valuable, possibly out of proportion to how much more costly it makes losing.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

loewenskind 16y ago

>ah, but reputation matters here... you don't want to have a reputation for being easy money for patent trolls. Giving into Oracle (who owns Sun's patents which were vast and probably only topped by IBM in the industry) is hardly going to give one the reputation for being patent troll bait. And doing what's best for the rest of the industry obviously isn't something Google cares about.

cnlwsu 16y ago
> doing what's best for the rest of the industry obviously isn't something Google cares about. I am sad that over the last year or so this has gone from a quiet fact of it being a corporation to a in-your-face "Google: do no evil unless you can make money". I guess each generation needs a company to fantasize about being a righteous white knight.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  I never bought into the whole "do no evil" bit, but I sure got sick of dealing with the army of people who did.
  - lsc 16y ago
    It's interesting to watch google... they are actually handling themselves /much better/ than I would expect them to... but I think there are solid business reasons for this. Google makes money because it uses data most of us consider private to serve up ads for us. If enough people stop trusting google, they will no longer be able to do this. Consumer trust is integral to their business. and there will always be tension, as to make money, they need to use at least some of that data to serve us ads, and some of us will take offense to that. I mean, really, there's no way they can run gmail profitably without doing things that I feel violates my privacy. Now, in the short term, they could earn boatloads of money by violating this trust in a more direct manner... but in the long term, it would kill them. I think that ever since they went public there has been a constant war there, short term profits, vs long-term viability. My own personal expectation was that this trust of google would not have lasted much past their IPO... it has lasted much longer than that. Personally, I find it odd that now that this trust is eroding, people seem to be complaining more about net neutrality than about google pushing the limits of what they can do with our private data. Of course, I'm a hosting provider, and thus oppose regulation of my market.