Is Microsoft the last holdout on an outmoded way of doing business, or is it the vanguard for intellectual-property licensing schemes that herald a new age of competitive cooperation?
Horacio Gutierrez, a friend and vice president of intellectual property and licensing at Microsoft, believes that it's the latter and argues that the best way to ensure true interoperability while simultaneously competing is through patent cross-licensing arrangements:
At the heart of these business arrangements is an honest recognition of the value of the intellectual assets that drive innovation. Such arrangements strike a balance between intellectual-property incentives that encourage, recognize, and reward innovation, and practical mechanisms for sharing intellectual property that are responsible, accessible, and affordable.
At Microsoft, we have created many such business arrangements--more than 500 in just five years--through the licensing of our intellectual property...In the coming months, we will continue to forge such agreements, and we call upon others to do the same.
Carefully crafted intellectual-property licensing deals help all of our customers maximize their IT investments by making sure hardware and software work well together, and they facilitate the sharing of intellectual assets through pragmatic business agreements that drive greater innovation and value in the IT marketplace.
Point taken, but this overlooks one major obstacle to such arrangements: need. Microsoft convinced Brother recently to license its patents so that Brother can run Linux drivers in some of its devices. Did you catch the oddity in there? Microsoft doesn't make drivers, Linux-based or otherwise. What intellectual property of Microsoft's did Brother need to license?
Only Microsoft knows, and it's not telling, despite repeated requests for Microsoft to open up on the patents it alleges that Linux violates. It's fine for Gutierrez to claim that intellectual property is the foundation for competition and cooperation, but when Microsoft is only willing to cooperate behind closed doors, it smacks of extortion, not partnership.
Microsoft has aggressively been acquiring patents over the years--10,000 of them now--and undoubtedly, these come in handy when doing broad cross-licensing pacts with other patent giants, such as IBM. But it's unclear why patents must be the gateway to cooperation, a fact pointed out by Microsoft's recent interoperability partnership with Red Hat, which included no patent licenses.
The foundation for partnership is trust, not intellectual property--something I've been telling Microsoft for years. Intellectual property must be respected, to Gutierrez's point, but Microsoft's fixation with intellectual property as the foundation for meaningful cooperation will prove its biggest stumbling block, and not its winning argument.
Microsoft should look around to see how IBM and other big patent holders use their patents. IBM seems to be able to work with open source just fine without waving its patent portfolio around. Microsoft should do the same.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Ina Fried of CNET News reports Tuesday on Microsoft's 10,000th patent, with Microsoft's chief patent counsel calling the milestone "a testament to all of the innovation that has been taking place."
Maybe. But innovation is what hasn't actually done Microsoft much good, at least as measured in terms of new product lines that generate material amounts of revenue for the company. It still gathers the vast majority of its revenue from Windows and Office, two product lines that have only incrementally improved (or, in the case of Vista, degenerated) over the past decade or two.
And, as Fried notes, Microsoft's patent horde has done little to help it defend itself from patent lawsuits, which have scaled up alongside the increasing size of its patent pile.
Given how much Microsoft has to lose from patent trolls, it's perhaps surprising that it, in turn, it has rattled its own patent saber against Linux, claiming violation of 235 of its patents.
Microsoft's chief patent counsel goes on to dub patents "the currency of innovation in our industry," but it's unclear what that currency buys Microsoft. Fame? Not really. Fortune? Nope, Microsoft already had that in Office and Windows, and patents haven't added much to the till.
Friends? Occasionally. Apple and Google have been fortunate beneficiaries of Microsoft's patents: ActiveSync is great (Microsoft) technology that makes Apple's iPhone much more useful and soon will do the same for Google's Android. But Brother, Samsung, and the other Microsoft patent rubes that have purchased protection from Linux? Not so useful.
Companies and people buy products, not patents. I'm sure that 10,000 patents is a nice symbolic achievement for Microsoft, but 10,000 products would be better.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Even as Microsoft has slipped into the mainstream of open source by embedding it in its products and adopting open-source strategies for services such as customer relationship management, it continues its subversive fight against Linux.
Linux is different, you see. Open source, as Microsoft is starting to recognize, is just another part of its ecosystem, one that it must support, if it wants Windows to continue to be a first-class computing citizen.
The open-source operating system, however, is competition--Microsoft's top competition, if CEO Steve Ballmer's words are to be taken at face value.
In this context, Microsoft's recent patent deal with Brother makes sense. Otherwise, as ZDNet UK opines, it's a deal that causes much head-scratching:
This time, the lucky donor of cash for secrets is Brother, which will now be allowed to use Microsoft patents to make printers.
As Microsoft doesn't make printers--indeed, (it) doesn't even make printer drivers--it is an interesting exercise to try and guess what's actually happened...(Microsoft) sends in the lads to midsize companies (that) would really suffer from a long court case, and who cares about that lovely legal fact of intellectual-property life: paying off a determined litigant is often cheaper than winning...If Microsoft cares about looking like a company more interested in innovating openly than doing closed deals, then it should be open on details such as which patents are involved.
Otherwise, Microsoft's trick of gaining revenue from licensing open-source software behind closed doors will smell more and more like extortion.
Slowly, behind the scenes, Microsoft continues to try to portray Linux as risky and Microsoft's patent coverage as insurance. Given that the company selling the insurance is also the one threatening a lawsuit, however, Microsoft needs to step very carefully to avoid the "extortionist" label. I personally believe that it has already crossed the line and needs to get back to competition between products, not lawyers.
Microsoft Windows competes well against Linux. The company doesn't need patent trickery. It has a compelling, valuable ecosystem that it can use against Linux. Why does it continue these Linux kidney punches, of which Microsoft claims it has closed more than 500 deals?
Perhaps Microsoft is the company with something to hide? The last time I checked, Linux was open source, with everything available for public inspection. In the Brother patent deal, as in all the others, Microsoft has made absolutely nothing available for public inspection to test the veracity of its claims. That's a sign of weakness, not of strength.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
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