Ken's Weblog

People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.

Tag: Microsoft

  • If you can’t beat them, extort them

    The three patents Microsoft is hammering the Nook with—and why they may be invalid.

    Microsoft's complaint against Barnes & Noble's Android-based Nook devices has been narrowed down to just three patents, with the US International Trade Commission having to decide whether Nook devices infringe on several patented methods of interacting with and downloading electronic documents. Barnes & Noble is also asking the ITC to declare the patents invalid because they cover obvious and trivial functionality.

    Microsoft’s ITC complaint, which was filed in March 2011 and targets Foxconn and Inventec in addition to Barnes & Noble, cited five patents. One 1994 patent related to “new varieties of child window controls [that] are provided as system resources that application programs may exploit,” and a 1997 patent related to how browsers load and display content in portable computers with limited display areas have since been dropped from the case.

    [Ars Technica]

    Here’s the sentence in the article that explains what this is really all about: “The ruling will be an important one in Microsoft’s quest to extract money from every Android hardware vendor.” In other words, having dismally flopped in their every attempt to develop a mobile device, Microsoft has given up on competition and turned to extorting money from companies that actually can develop useful devices.

  • Bad news for Skype users

    The big news this month is that Microsoft is buying Skype. That’s bad news for me, as I replaced my old-fashioned landline with Skype years ago. While I was already using it mostly on my Windows machine, I did also occasionally make Skype calls from my Mac laptop and my iPad. Skype was already somewhat indifferent in their support of Apple OSes (they never did release an iPad-specific version), and we can expect that to get worse or be dropped entirely once the purchase goes through. We can also expect them to ruin the Windows version with thousands of “features” that nobody wants.