Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?
businessinsider.com
Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?
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Re: Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?
#2[deleted]
Re: Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?
#3 Of that, $2 billion in losses are attributable to the Xbox platform.
Re: Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?
#4Of that, $2 billion in losses are attributable to the Xbox platform. Wow, I would have never imagined the Xbox division to be in dire straits.
Microsoft and Sony have lost $3-5bn on the PS3/XBox 360-generation of consoles.
Re: Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?
#5If these numbers are accurate, then yuck!!! My disgust for software patents just went up even further.
More seriously, I have a question for those who know more about this...
1. Are these generic, broad "idea" patents and hence there is nothing Google/OEMs can really do here to avoid licensing them? If not, why don't they use an alternative implementation to avoid the conflict?
2. If the answer to #1 is yes, how does Apple avoid this problem? Are they also licensing from Microsoft? Or is Apple in some sort of a mutual cross-licensing agreement here to fight the common enemy Google?
Re: Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?
#6Earn (verb): 'gain or incur deservedly in return for one's behavior or achievements.'
So why change the article's title, HN?
Re: Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?
#7Of that, $2 billion in losses are attributable to the Xbox platform. Wow, I would have never imagined the Xbox division to be in dire straits.
I don't think Microsoft has ever made a profit on Xbox, although I'm sure they've split up and distributed its losses to all sorts of divisions to hide that. They're about to do the same with Bing, too, now.
Re: Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?
#8How much money is Ubuntu and Firefox budgeting for patent licenses on their mobile OS?
Re: Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?
#9Of that, $2 billion in losses are attributable to the Xbox platform. Wow, I would have never imagined the Xbox division to be in dire straits.
I don't think Microsoft has ever made a profit on Xbox, although I'm sure they've split up and distributed its losses to all sorts of divisions to hide that. They're about to do the same with Bing, too, now.
So why do they make the xbox? Why are they making another one?
Re: Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?
#10How can a company so shamelessly extract money (through forceful deals, no doubt) from an open source OS, and get away with it?
Linux companies dodged this bullet for the most part, from both Microsoft and SCU, but it seems Microsoft "succeeded" this time against Android with their mostly garbage patents in the same way patent trolls and mass-bittorrent lawsuits have succeeded so far - by scaring people/companies into paying up, without having to get into any lawsuit, which is exactly what patent trolls have been doing for a while.
As soon as B&N was about to invalidate some of their main patents, they quickly "invested" $300 million into B&N (i.e. they settled), and B&N dropped the lawsuit. I wish more OEM's would've had the balls to call their bluff.
So EFF - any proposals for stopping corporate patent trolls like Microsoft, Rockstar Consortium and Intellectual Ventures, yet?