Android will be a billion dollar business, for Microsoft

Say what? They are definitely playing the game (see link). Otherwise, I totally agree with you, the patent stuff (Nortel) is getting out of hand. If the DOJ lets that go through that's just sad, its clearly anti-competitive. The android/MS revenue stream story has been popping up a lot recently. Its interesting, to say the least.

[LINK]

quote:

---

Microsoft hasn't done anything innovative in a decade

---

I think the .Net framework was pretty big for them. Of course thats getting close to 10 years ago.

They do a ton of small things though and they are one of the only companies that puts a ton of money into pure research.

quote:

---

Kinect?

---

Ok ok, I was upset.

As for "playing the patent game", yeah I guess Google is finally deciding to fight fire with fire. As it stands now, though, Microsoft has on the order of 25 times as many patents as Google. I believe Microsoft was awarded more patents in the past year than Google has total. Google bid pi billion dollars on Nortel's portfolio, as if they aren't taking it seriously. I almost don't blame them when the whole system is essentially a joke.

Todays new businesses model is to have the lawyers make money for you.

No difference between the patent whores and the class action plaintiff whores.

I'm not in this world anymore, but during the dot.com years the patent game was out of control. Companies were patenting shite like "a 1 pixel white line below the company logo on a website".

Oh nothing has changed in that regard. The only difference is the dollar figure. We should call it the patent multiple. Now, I would say that this would be an obvious P/E with price being price of patent and earnings being expected earnings directly attributed to said patent. And since companies (and analysts) love to strip shite out of earnings, I would say those earnings should be core earnings, not litigation related. I would however suggest that the denominator might often be very low, giving ridiculous ratios like 4,000,000,000/1. Therefore, I suggest we flip the ratio, call it patent yield, then adjust it to a reasonable percentage by multiplying by a million.

quote:

---

You don't think Android makes it easy for developers?

---

True, I was thinking Sony, Nintendo, Apple and all the wireless carriers that like to lock you into only what they sell. But Microsoft realizes it's behind and is really going out of its way to court developers.

quote:

---

Microsoft's been playing it really cool with the nascent Windows Phone 7 hacker community so far, which is winning them friends in all sorts of important places -- not the least of which is the ChevronWP7 team itself. The first guys to split the platform open for homebrew apps were recently invited up to Redmond for a powwow with the guys in charge, and it seems the meetings were fruitful to say the least; though much of what they saw was under NDA, they say they're "genuinely excited" by what Microsoft has in the works. Furthermore, Microsoft was kind enough to give the team a heads-up that an upcoming platform update would break the existing ChevronWP7 tool, though they say they're "collaborating with Microsoft on an interim solution that will continue to support homebrew developments after the update." Considering that they've already reached out to jailbreaker extraordinaire Geohot as well, it's clear that Microsoft doesn't believe this is a black-and-white situation -- the ChevronWP7 guys seem to think homebrew has a place somewhere in the platform's future, it just remains to be seen how that's going to play out.

---

LINK /

Microsoft has had many innovations in the last couple years, just not all of them are widely public or "exciting" for the run of the mill consumer.

Kinect broke records left and right for consumer adoption and is contantly being used in scenerios' outside of gaming. Real world applications for a motion system where the device cost under 200$ are endless.

SharePoint and .NET have changed the world as far as workflow and custom line of business application creation making it easier for companies to home grow process and applications.

There have also been massive innovations with SQL server making it scalable in as a parallel data warehouse on par with Oracle at a quarter of the price.

And also Lync is another that is storming the enterprise. That ability to collaborate and perform video conferencing over SIP instead of expensive H. protocols allows many companies to enter into onpremise collaboration for a quarter of what they would have spent in the past.

These are just a few, but also alot of MS innovation is patented then used by other companies.

Windows Azure is HUGE for cloud based computing. It's so huge, guess where Apple is hosting its' ICloud solution?

quote:

---

Microsoft has had many innovations in the last couple years, just not all of them are widely public or "exciting" for the run of the mill consumer.

Kinect broke records left and right for consumer adoption and is contantly being used in scenerios' outside of gaming. Real world applications for a motion system where the device cost under 200$ are endless.

SharePoint and .NET have changed the world as far as workflow and custom line of business application creation making it easier for companies to home grow process and applications.

There have also been massive innovations with SQL server making it scalable in as a parallel data warehouse on par with Oracle at a quarter of the price.

And also Lync is another that is storming the enterprise. That ability to collaborate and perform video conferencing over SIP instead of expensive H. protocols allows many companies to enter into onpremise collaboration for a quarter of what they would have spent in the past.

These are just a few, but also alot of MS innovation is patented then used by other companies.

Windows Azure is HUGE for cloud based computing. It's so huge, guess where Apple is hosting its' ICloud solution?

---

We are going way off topic here, but I will respond. I have already conceded that Kinect is pretty innovative. The rest of the "innovations" you've listed look to me like Microsoft's implementations of ages-old ideas and products. If it took "massive innovations" for SQL Server to be on par with Oracle, then it sounds like they were pretty far behind.

Anyway, I'm sure Microsoft does do some actual groundbreaking work. They almost have to with all the money they spend. I just don't want to see them turn into patent trolls.