I am surprised at the amount of mention Dragon is getting here. It has been a long, and at times tragic road. I worked at a company that used Dragon's technolog

I am surprised at the amount of mention Dragon is getting here. It has been a long, and at times tragic road. I worked at a company that used Dragon's technology in a voice control product for the original Macintosh. Mostly, I worked on a Windows version for a multimedia architecture Intel was developing, which entailed the acquisition of Spectron for a DSP OS. I got to meet a lot of the people involved at other companies in the project, including the Jim and Janet Baker, who founded Dragon, and many people at Intel up to and including Andy Grove. It was remarkable that he took interest in what was a relatively small project that was also distant from Intel's core products. I also met Jo Lernout, the L in L&H, which played a role in subsequent tragic events for the Bakers. All those people, and most of the technologies from those days, are gone now. Dragon ended up a part of Nuance, which itself had been called ScanSoft, and, before that, was a part of Xerox that, if I recall correctly, was acquired by Xerox from Ray Kurzweil. ScanSoft became a roll-up of a large number of speech technology companies. One of them was Nuance, and the roll-up was rebranded Nuance. Another acquisition was L&H, which had collapsed due to a financial scandal, which blew up after L&H had acquired Dragon. The Bakers got screwed and sued Goldman, who did the L&H deal. They lost. And that is your capsule history of Nuance. Sorry to give short shrift to the acquired companies I have no firsthand knowledge of. I believe the real story of Microsoft buying Nuance is that Nuance owns an enormous number of patents.