not at their scale, look at it this way if they each have a ton of patents that can be used against the other than neither has incentive to sue over any patents

not at their scale, look at it this way if they each have a ton of patents that can be used against the other than neither has incentive to sue over any patents. It doesn't matter that you build a device that infringes x patent because if the other corp sues you for X you sue them back for Y. The goal of these companies to create a large pool of patents that they can use against anyone who attacks them. It has to be broad to cover all types of companies that might dare suing. Microsoft has a huge head start here, they probably have patents in just about any market and I bet they could get more from Intellectual Ventures (run by ex employee of Microsoft) in just about anything else. Google on the other hand is young and is just starting to amass it's arsenal. They need good patents right now. If only they had not been stupid and had bought Sun for 8 billion (or even a little more, it was worth it) they could be avoiding a lot of this crap. Sun had a wide range of patents. That was a really dumb move not even bidding for the company. Anyway this little spat right now makes it even more obvious that patents are being used as barrier to entry for the smaller guys. Google even as big as it is has a hard time entering the cell phone OS market and is being attacked. This should be the definition of Anti-competitive behavior.