Haha, when you have to sue your competitors to stop them from totally crushing you in business, it's game over, you have already lost. To be honest patents don

Haha, when you have to sue your competitors to stop them from totally crushing you in business, it's game over, you have already lost. To be honest patents don't protect shit and their only value is in protecting oneself from pointless litigation by losers. The only way to protect your margins from attack by the competition is to have a naturally defensible product that derives it's value from the very nature of its use. Google search is naturally defensible. No one has their code (NDAs FTW!), and no one has the cash or the competence to build the computing infrastructure to serve that code. Microsoft Office/Windows was naturally defensible thanks to the network effects generated by third party applications on the platform, until the Internet/Linux destroyed that by being cheaper and faster. The iLine of products from Apple was naturally defensible for the same reasons as Windows, until Android ate their lunch, just like Windows ate Apple's lunch back in the 1980s. Apple also cried like a bunch of babies way back then and sued Microsoft for eating their lunch using GUI patents. > History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. -- Mark Twain If you're in the tech world you’re mantra should be: innovate don't litigate. Apple and Microsoft, you have just shown that you'd rather litigate than innovate. Whenever that happens in the tech world that means that you are done.