7 ms·
Microsoft Is Getting Rich on Android
- clarky07 13y agoWhile it is funny that they make more on android, they are hardly "getting rich" off it. 100 mil for msft is peanuts. It doesn't move the needle.
- tanzam75 13y agoMicrosoft had net income of $5 billion last quarter. $100 million isn't "getting rich," but it is 2% of net income. Granted, it's a smaller percentage of net revenues than of net income. But patent licenses are essentially pure profit, right? You're not doing the R&D for the purpose of getting patent licensing revenue.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoIt's a hundred million more than they deserve for that patent.
- kevingadd 13y agoAren't these numbers ignoring the possibility that some of those Windows Phone revenues are from app/game purchases on the Windows Phone store?
- nivla 13y agoDoes anyone know what patents are claimed by Microsoft on Android? Is it one for FAT16/32? Correct me if I am wrong but isn't FAT16/32 Microsoft's proprietary format? So why is it wrong for them to put a claim on it? Wouldn't Apple do the same?
- beagle3 13y agoFAT goes back to CPM, maybe even farther (long before Microsoft, and any patents on the original would have expired 20 years ago, and there weren't software patents back then). The extension from FAT12 to FAT16 and FAT32 is trivial.
- nivla 13y agoI thought FAT came from DOS, which was Microsoft owned. If FAT wasn't Microsoft's original design, then I think its very unfair that they got the patent for it in the first place, let alone enforcing it.
- beagle3 13y agoThe fat patents Microsoft holds describe encoding names that are not 8.3 format like dos/cpm
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago>Common name space for long and short filenames https://www.google.com/patents/US5758352 https://www.google.com/patents/US5758352
- Someone 13y agoIIRC, CP/M had 8.3 file names, ctrl-Z terminated text files, and drive letters, but its on-disk structures where totally different. That certainly was the case when comparing it to FAT versions that allow for subdirectories (CP/M did not have subdirectories)
- 13y ago
- guard-of-terra 13y agoThe idea Microsoft gets money from Android devices despite not doing anything other than stiffling innovation for the last ten years makes me want ppl in Microsoft have bad stuff happening to them.
- mslot 13y agoStifling innovation? Microsoft was developing software for mobile devices more than 10 years before Google did and for a long time it was the main driver behind the market for PDA/smart phone components (e.g., colour/touch screens, ARM CPUs).
- guard-of-terra 13y agoThey sort of parked their mobile devices progress in the same sense they tried to park IE forever at version 6 and Windows at version XP. I guess they figured out they no longer have to innovate now when all the market was theirs following the fall of (Netscape, Mac & other OSes, Palm). And when iPhone came the whole Windows Mobile thing imploded like a house of cards.
- lttlrck 13y agoYou cannot compare the failure of Windows Mobile to IE6. The situation created by IE6 popularity was in all likelyhood a fluke, I am not sure Microsoft had a grand nefarious plan that they successfully executed at all. Besides without IE6 we would have most likely had to wait longer for Firefox and Chrome.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoI don't think it's a grand nefarous plan. They just thought that they made it. That all the revolutions of desktop browsing (or PDA OSes) are over, and what they have to do until the end of eternity is introducing small evolutionary changes while preserving reverse compatibility. And that they did. But they were wrong, browsing revolution happened which left IE6, 7 and partially 8 in the dust. Mobile happened, which made them throw away all the Windows Mobile and make it from scratch. They were not ready to innovate by writing heroic projects fast and tried to persuade market that glacial is okay from now.
- melling 13y agoThis is unfortunate for Android but consumers are still much better off by having a 3rd major operating system. I really hope Android(or Chrome/Android) becomes a viable desktop solution.
- codex 13y agoGoogle's somewhat foolish acquisition of Motorola would begin to show some dividends if they could leverage Motorola's patents to force a cross licensing agreement which didn't involve paying these fees.