re: Android will be a billion dollar business, for Microsoft

quote:

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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".

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I learned recently that this patent strategy is a relatively new phenomenon. Supposedly back in the 80's, instead of patenting, hardware makers would just do shite to make it hard for competitors to reverse engineer. e.g. They would put gooey shite or tar or something in the hardware so if you tried to break it open, you couldn't really tell what was going on.