How many times yesterday did you do a web search that led you to a Wikipedia page that then didn’t load because of that site’s SOPA protest?  I didn’t notice the effect immediately but once I did I was later able to go back through my browser history and see that I tried and failed to open a total of 13 Wikipedia pages so far.  Whether you give a damn about SOPA or public protest, this experience has given me a whole new respect for the role Wikipedia has come to play in my life and probably yours.

As a result I made a small donation to Wikipedia around lunchtime then cursed it the rest of the day for failing me seven more times.

As for the SOPA/PIPA protest itself, I sympathize. But in my view what we have here is mainly a conflict of business models, dying industries, and really, really poor design that will work itself out over time.

Remember the record album — the LP?  Some were great, most were not. Too many B tracks if you ask me. The music industry has long had a problem of value.  The groups I liked sometimes didn’t have many good songs.  The record companies would put one or two good songs on an LP or CD, then throw in 10 more that weren’t so good.  There were no warning labels which matter to me now that I am a parent.  All we wanted were good songs at a reasonable price, which didn’t mean the 15-20 percent yield we were getting from albums.

Then came iTunes and all those problems went away.  iTunes did more than just sell the songs the record companies were pushing: they sold whole collections of music.  As a result, more, not less, music was sold, most of it the good stuff. Music — if not the recording industry — is better as a result. Steve Jobs proved thinking about the consumer is very good business.

Now we have SOPA and PIPA.  I would like to have the same ability to build an online movie library as I have done with music, but there are big problems with this, starting with Windows Media Center and, yes, even iTunes — pretty good products in their own right that protect the copyrights of stored content.  That part is okay.  But they have very little third party support.  Then there is the problem of content.  I can buy only a fraction of what I’d like to get and it is scattered over several suppliers.  If the movie and TV industries think I am going to subscribe to 5-10 services for $10-25 a month each, they’re nuts.

The movie and TV industries are doing now exactly what the recording industry did before iTunes.  SOPA and PIPA will die but they’ll be replaced with something just as bad because lawmakers are stupid and producers are afraid of the future — a future that’s coming no matter what the entertainment industry does.  For the money they are spending on lobbying, a design team could develop a new system that would make more money by exposing more content, not less, enabling new business models in the process.  At least that’s my take on it.

Changing subjects, Jerry Yang recently got his choice of replacement CEOs again (Jerry’s fourth CEO — fifth if you include choosing himself in 2007) then almost immediately bailed from his every Yahoo connection: what’s up with that?  I wish I knew, but I have some suspicions.  An intervention, perhaps?  Jerry was such an obstructionist to Yahoo moving forward in almost any direction that someone on the inside may finally have told him to sit down and shut up, which I am sure Tim Koogle wanted to do many times.

I can see Jack Ma making a preemptive move like that, saying he’ll pay $1 billion more for Yahoo’s Alibaba stake if Jerry takes a hike first.

Nah, sounds too simple.  More likely Yang finally got tired of playing the bad cop and decided to retire to his private golf course.  I’ll be very interested to see what his next career move will be.  Off the board and owning less than five percent of the company (no SEC reporting requirements) it could be trying to make money trading on what’s sure to be a wild ride for Yahoo over the next several months.

Another change of subject — remember my problem just after Christmas trying to upgrade Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional using one of those instant upgrade cards I bought at WalMart? Though I tried to do the upgrade every day, it wasn’t until this past weekend — two and a half weeks after I started — that the Windows Instant Upgrade website was no longer down for maintenance. I’m not making this up nor can I be the only person with this particular problem, yet run a Google News search and you’ll see I’m almost the only person to write about it. What’s with that?

Well it is certainly humbling for me: I’m clearly not the hotshot reporter thought I was or possibly use to be. But it also brings into question the whole idea of viral growth in news stories and why one story gets picked up and another doesn’t.  It beats the crap out of me why it happens.  One thing I don’t suspect, though, is any concerted effort by Microsoft to shape the news other than by simply ignoring me. I certainly felt no pressure from them.

Frankly, I wish I had been pressured by Microsoft.  That would have been fun.

And now that I have Windows RDP service to my thin clients from a brand new Windows 7 server, how is it working out for my trio of young users?  Terrible. Even elementary school gamers overload this system despite first 8 and now 16 gigs of DDR3 RAM. Thin clients (and thick — I’ve tried both) fail the FusionFall test.

multidimensional, get it?

I was watching this Bloomberg video the other day featuring Shawn Carolan, the venture capitalist who backed the Siri electronic personal assistant startup then sold it to Apple. His was the closest I’d heard to a technical explanation of how Siri works and it surprised me because it sounded a lot like technology I remembered from years ago at Excite, the long-defunct search engine.  Please look at the video and then meet me in the next paragraph.  The part that excited me (no pun intended) is about four minutes in.

Okay, he said they used linguistic techniques to map blocks of words against 10 possible domains of expertise to figure out what the heck you are asking Siri to do, with the real breakthrough being treating the entire user question or order as a single linguistic unit.

Now let’s jump back to 1994.  Eighteen years ago the search engine technology standard was set by Alta Vista, which spun out of Digital Equipment Corporation. Alta Vista pioneered web indexing with spiders dragging back web pages and it pioneered keyword searches. But if a keyword wasn’t present, Alta Vista would never return the web page you really needed because Alta Vista wasn’t smart enough.

Today the search engine standard is of course Google which uses PageRank to measure relevance by putting higher in the search results those pages that are linked to by more other pages.  Adding to this (yes, I know I’m over-simplifying — feel free to correct me) Google knows a lot about synonyms and how word meaning changes in different contexts — basic linguistic tools that were probably out of Alta Vista’s reach simply because of the processing power required.

And then there was Excite, which was completely different. When I first visited the company in 1994 it was called ArchiText and was six Stanford students operating from their Los Altos garage. I helped them find their first customer and their first venture capitalist, Steve Coit of Charles River Ventures. Vinod came along later.

Most of the ArchiText boys were semantic systems majors and they took a very different technical approach to search than did Alta Vista or that other up-and-coming search engine, Yahoo, which in those days did the task the old fashioned way — by hand.

ArchiText used spiders, too, and built its own web index, but from the start the company was dedicated to finding useful search results even if they didn’t include any search terms from the original user query — seemingly an enormous job.  Google does some of that through its elaborate algorithm, mentioned above, but Google’s technique is for the most part hard coded and brute force while ArchiText’s was very different and, well, elegant.

Here’s how the ArchiText (later Excite) search engine worked. Every query was stripped to its significant words — subjects, objects, verbs and adjectives — then each query became a vector in a multidimensional space with each unique word being a dimension.  “How do space rockets stay in orbit when they are flying through space?” would become a vector string one unit long for each of those words but two units long for the word “space.”  This bit of semantic DNA was then mapped against an index of millions of web pages that had all been similarly converted to multidimensional vectors.

Finding the most relevant results then became a simple matter of grabbing the N vectors (web pages) nearest to the query vector in that multidimensional space.  It was quick, scalable, concentrated the processing load on the indexing where it didn’t bog down retrieval, and could reliably return pages like “Why satellites fall from the sky” that might answer the question even though none of the same words were used.

Compare that to the description of Siri from the Bloomberg video.  Siri takes the entire query as a single block and maps it against a corpus composed of 10 domains of expertise looking for a fit, or perhaps for the best fit.

Technically it sounds darned similar to me, but then I’m forever condemned to remember old crap like this.

In the long run PageRank was more useful to the real world, Excite got sucked into @Home and the whole mess blew up with the dot-com meltdown, but not before all this technology was patented — patents owned today by Excite@Home’s creditors, which surprised me given that the original inventor, Graham Spencer, now works at Google.

Those old Excite patents, while nearing the end of their lives, could turn out to be very valuable to, say, a Google trying to compete with Siri on Android or even to an Apple trying to defend Siri from competitors.

I expect we’ll see those patents change hands sometime soon.

Let me be clear about this just in case my clever headline makes no sense: I think the Yahoo board punted by hiring Scott Thompson, who is either a stooge for Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang or a convenient placeholder until the company can be sold.

I have nothing against Thompson, who did an able, if very vanilla, job at PayPal, but there is nothing — nothing — that distinguishes him as a new media executive. With a wildly dysfunctional outfit like Yahoo, he’ll be in over his head from the first day. I hope for his sake there’s a golden parachute rip cord available for pulling.

His best hope — and it isn’t much of a hope — is that Jerry Yang has come to his senses and at least gives Thompson good orders to follow.

You can’t blame Thompson for wanting to take the top job at, as he calls it, an iconic company. Nor can you blame him for thinking he can turn Yahoo around. But I can blame the Yahoo board all day and night for being a roomful of bozos.

Shareholders should throw out the entire Yahoo board.

Moving sucks. Our furniture arrived late last week so I’ve been off the clock for awhile and there is a lot of catching-up to do.  We’ll start with Microsoft and Windows 8, which I’ll argue are going to be formidable competitors in the tablet space, primarily because it’s that or start spending all that cash on diversified investments to turn Microsoft into a Berkshire Hathaway. This is probably Ballmer’s last stand as a high tech CEO.

It was entirely by coincidence that I interviewed both Jon Shirley and Bill Gates in their last weeks as Microsoft CEO. In Shirley’s case it was his final day and I’ve never seen a guy more eager to get out of town. And why not?  Running any major corporation must be a huge undertaking that I don’t ever want to try, though of course I’m perfectly willing to criticize. Shirley was at the end of a fabulous run and knew it.  Gates‘ departure was a little different, since I sensed much of the incentive was to help Redmond’s anti-trust strategy at the time, removing from power the guy popularly (and properly) seen as perp-in-chief. Ballmer’s job taking over from Gates was mainly to not rock the boat while carefully turning Microsoft into a kinder and gentler company that could still crush rivals as needed. But in the process (and this is my point here) Ballmer gave up Microsoft’s ability to turn on a dime.  Now Ballmer has to regain that capability or lose his job.

Microsoft under Bill Gates was defined by his 1995 memo The Internet Tidal Wave. Prior to that time the PC future seemed to be about multimedia and CD-ROM, because that’s where Apple was heading and Microsoft was used to following that lead, having developed resources like its Encarta digital encyclopedia. The Internet surprised Gates, but when he came back from his annual Think Week that year he was up to speed and had both a plan (dominate the emerging Internet era) and a rival to crush in order to achieve that end (Netscape). Microsoft always needs a rival to crush. Now it was just a matter of telling several thousand developers that their jobs had changed.

Gates was able to do this — to turn Microsoft’s development supertanker — by force of will and example. Understand this is a guy who hadn’t written production code since the Tandy 102 shipped in 1983, but he had carefully nurtured and preserved the ability to intimidate shy developers with his Aspergerian bluntness. “I can tell good code from across the room,” and “I could write that in a weekend” still worked back in 1995.

Ballmer never had these cards to play, having ceded to Gates-the-genius all claims of technical prowess. Microsoft geeks saw Ballmer as a joke and that image was perpetuated through all the making nice-nice that followed his rise to CEO as well as by a succession of software architects starting with Gates, himself, who simply didn’t envision it being a problem and saw no need to empower Ballmer. Well it was a problem.

Over the last year or so Ballmer has done a lot of executive pruning at Microsoft, taking more control of the company’s direction. He has tried to mute his Monkey Boy image as the honey-swigging sales chief who rants at company meetings. But thanks to YouTube, that image will remain for a long time.

Last week we saw the first public results of Ballmer’s executive makeover. The version of Windows 8 shared with developers was more refined than many expected, the tablet extensions appear to be well done and the ARM support is sincere. There is work still to be done but it feels a lot like Windows NT did post-OS/2. It has to be good because Microsoft is caught in a platform shift that could see it five years from now a profitable but inconsequential company.

In order to avoid that end (and keep his job, because even as the company’s third-largest shareholder Ballmer can’t escape personal responsibility this time) Microsoft has to really push technology for the first time in years. Redmond has to embrace tablets and even use its enterprise clout to push big customers in that direction, because doing a half-assed job this time doesn’t have the saving grace of most customers just re-upping with high-margin earlier versions of Microsoft products. This time the platform transition is going to happen with or without Microsoft and Ballmer knows that.

I won’t be surprised, then, to see Microsoft succeed. They can do this. But will they?  I won’t be surprised, either, to see them fail, though I don’t think they will.

That is not to say, though, that I agree with the industry analysts who are predicting Windows Phone will eventually dominate. That train left the station a long time ago. But Microsoft has a real shot with the enterprise (notice I say enterprise) tablet market.

And this tablet orientation is going to have interesting side effects. Take Yahoo, which we discussed last week.  What evidence is there that Yahoo has a tablet strategy?  None. They need one. Every Microsoft or Apple competitor does.

This is my promised follow-up to How Not to Run Yahoo, so I suppose this should have been titled How to Run Yahoo, but I’m too much of a smart-ass for that.  I spoke to a bunch of smart people (past and present Yahoos) some of whom even allowed me to print their names, and here’s our consensus view on what the next Yahoo CEO really has to do to turn the company around. I’m sorry it all sounds so negative, but it is toward a positive end, remember.

Yahoo has a bureaucracy problem that I attribute to former CEO Terry Semel, who hired legions of vice presidents to insulate the former Hollywood studio boss from the rude fact that he wasn’t, anymore, a Hollywood studio boss.  Since Semel didn’t seem to get what Yahoo was about, he hired lots of people to keep him from having to personally deal with it.

Here’s how my friend Randy put it: “My beef with Yahoo is that they have way too many layers (I might have the exact titles wrong, but the number of layers is right) — associates, senior associates, managers, senior managers, directors, senior directors, general managers, VPs, SVPs, EVPs, regional presidents. This is absolutely crazy. They have more VP-level employees than you could ever imagine. Their product and engineering talent sits under all of these layers. It’s no wonder they’re not a technology company anymore. That’s what they need to fix first — flatten the company. Firing a bunch of senior execs who can’t get it done and not replacing them would go a long way. No more senior directors, no more GMs, and way fewer VPs and SVPs.”

Step one, then — fire the executive fat.

Step two is all me: reorganize business development and place it lower in the organization.  Biz-dev at Yahoo seems mainly intent on not doing deals, which may be a safe bet for a high tech company that wants to die, but not for one that needs to reinvent itself like Yahoo does. We’re starting to see similar behavior, too, at Google.  Place the decision making authority where the knowledge is, as they used to say at Intel but apparently never said at Yahoo. It’s time to let divisions manage their own deal flow.

At this point I was blessed by an e-mail from Larry Tesler, former head of customer experience at Yahoo as well as chief scientist at Apple and some similarly impressive title at Amazon.com. Larry, one of the smartest and nicest guys you’ll ever meet put it right on the line. His advice for Yahoo is below and it feels right-on to me. If the Yahoo board self-decimates as seems to be expected, I think Larry deserves one of those open board seats. He’d be a big help.

“If I were running Yahoo! with the goal of turning the business around, what might I do? asked Larry, repeating my question. “You can quote any or all of what’s below in that context.

“First, I’d be sure that retention incentives for top innovators and operators were in place. Then I’d embark on a three-year disciplined turnaround. I’d identify a few existing businesses that are profitable and competitively strong, boost them by updating features, user experience and operational efficiency, and sell or shut down everything else.

“I’d liquidate the Alibaba stake, probably a little at a time, to generate cash.

“I’d pick a dozen exciting ideas for breakthrough services. They could come from the patent portfolio, Yahoo! Research and other internal sources. Or from acquisitions of unique, patent-protected technologies. I’d focus the innovators on those and keep the operators away (my emphasis here –Bob). I’d introduce one or two such services a year and invest heavily in their marketing, customer service and product quality.

“At first, I’d focus one third of executive staff meetings on the progress of business exits, one third on the needs of the remaining businesses, and one third on the maturest innovations. Over time, these proportions would change. I’d make long term strengthening of the brand a factor in every major decision.”

If you wonder why Carol Bartz is gone it’s because she didn’t seem to do any of this. Maybe she wasn’t allowed to or maybe she just didn’t get it. Hopefully the next Yahoo CEO will get it.

I seem to be writing a lot of these What the heck was that? columns explaining recent news events. This time it is the firing of Carol Bartz as CEO of Yahoo. I’m not here to defend Bartz, whom I would have fired long ago (or more probably not hired in the first place), but I want to make the point that for all her failings, Bartz was mainly fired for being a hardass.  It’s not what she did or didn’t do as much as her style while doing it.

Carol Bartz is, like beer, an acquired taste.  I like her, but she has a long history of bothering sensitive geeks. The old-timers at Autodesk (a very geeky company where she was CEO) absolutely hated Bartz for her brusque style.

Some of this was casting. Remember Bartz was hired specifically to be not Jerry Yang, the Yahoo co-founder who preceded her as CEO.  Jerry has a brusqueness of his own, but his brusqueness is on behalf of the geeks, since he comes from their ranks. To be different from Jerry yet also turn the company around pretty much required that Bartz piss-off nearly everyone, which she gleefully did. If the company was doing better business-wise, she’d still be getting away with it. But over the long haul Bartz came to be seen inside as a pain-in-the-ass who also wasn’t delivering.

Some people will ask whether Bartz would have been fired with the same style and performance had she been a man?  I think that had she been a man she wouldn’t have been hired in the first place, so the broader question is moot.

So what happens now for Yahoo?  While it will be pitched differently than this, I expect the second coming of Jerry Yang. Jerry can’t be CEO again (or shouldn’t — he’s smarter than to try that) but the real power still lies with he and his cronies. They’ll choose somebody to take the CEO job but I think the company will be run more by consensus.  Jerry’s a smart guy and he learns from his mistakes.  But will it be enough to satisfy Wall Street?  I don’t know.

For all Yahoo’s problems, this is the part of the show where I point out that Wall Street is really, really stupid about how tech companies should be managed. Analysts tend to take a structural approach, looking at inputs and outputs and cash flows like Yahoo or any of its competitors are manufacturing those electrons on assembly lines.  It doesn’t work that way.

I’ve written about this many times over the years. These are companies built purely on intellect — companies where there are a few individuals who are capable of doing things that are unique in their enterprise.  Imagine a General Motors where there was only one worker who could make really fine exhaust systems. That wouldn’t work in Detroit but it does work in Silicon Valley because the output of that one person can be amplified a thousand or a million times.

Look at Google and its acquisitions, for example.  Google notoriously buys companies only to discard their products. This is clearly because Google is acquiring the people for their potential. Yet analysts wring their hands over the lost products as though that was what really mattered and the acquisitions had somehow failed. The truth is the products were inconsequential all along.

Are some individual contributors worth $100 million?  Yes, though Wall Street gets that backward, too, thinking CEOs are worth that kind of money, which they aren’t.

Back to Yahoo, a distracted, demoralized, and not very efficient company.  But at this point bringing-in a manager with the goal of increasing efficiency would I think be a mistake.  People don’t get this.  What Yahoo needs to do is dig deep in the human resources it already has and pull out something new that will change the game.  And to do that the first thing the company needs to do is heal.

Next time around whoever runs Yahoo will have to be much more sensitive to cultural issues. They will want someone who can unite the company and create a more aspirational firm that looks to innovate and be forward thinking, yet also not trapped by the Jerry Yang syndrome of risk avoidance. Yahoo needs a bit of risk-taking at this point, but it would be a mistake to hire someone who comes in with the idea of making the company a more efficient machine.

Who will buy Hulu, the IPTV streaming service and why should we care? I’m not sure I do care, now that Lie to Me has been canceled, but in case you are an American who feels the future of series television is important, here’s what I think is going on.

The Wall $treet Journal says Apple is thinking of making a bid for Hulu and Seattlepi.com says Microsoft’s is no longer interested, which leaves Amazon, Apple, Google, Yahoo, and any unnamed parties. I can’t think of any unnamed parties, by the way, so I’m guessing one of these will walk with Hulu, which went into play a couple weeks ago following an unsolicited (and still unidentified) bid.

Of course the three big network owners of Hulu will guarantee five years of continued program access with the first two years exclusive. That’s because they have no money in Hulu and each stands to walk with $600+ million from the sale, but only if there is a sale. Without such an exclusivity period there will be no sale and no $600+ million. None of these networks can buy out the others for antitrust reasons so the “networks might balk” story is just to sell newspapers (or electrons). Hulu will be sold.

It will be interesting to see how much Hulu will cost the winner, though. The company appears to be managing the press brilliantly to generate buzz. Any of the interested parties could do the deal all in cash, no problem. But who will end up with it? Here’s my score sheet.

Apple will buy Hulu if the price is right, but how much higher than $2 Billion they will go? I suspect Apple may actually be just meddling here, trying to make it more expensive for the eventual winner.

Microsoft has already telegraphed that $2 billion is too high, but since they probably can’t afford to not be in this business that suggests they will put some smaller amount (still $1+ billion) into content deals.

For that matter, all the losers will be looking for content, so I’d say $4+ billion is up for grabs in Hollywood beyond Hulu. New cars all around!

Amazon just did a content deal with CBS (so did Netflix — remember them?) so buying Hulu would round out their content for Amazon Prime, likely bringing-in millions more customer accounts. But there, too, it depends on what is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ price target. He and Jobs are very similar in that they will have a maximum in mind and probably won’t go higher.

My gut suggests that the auction will finally come down to Google and Yahoo, if Google can get this past the feds despite its dominant position with YouTube. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz probably sees this as her best chance to avoid being fired so I think she’ll bid high. I suspect, too, that Yahoo’s unsolicited interest was what started Hulu in play in the first place, though that’s just a guess on my part.

Buying Hulu could also be Bartz’ undoing, though, because she could blow half her cash or more (I suspect Google will go to $3 billion and Yahoo will beat that) and then find herself in a position where she can’t make a profit on her purchase, especially since she’ll have to do her own CBS deal at that point and CBS CEO Les Moonves won’t make that cheap. Amazon reportedly paid $100+ million to CBS, but Moonves will try to hold out for closer to the $600+ million he would have received had CBS been a Hulu owner, seeing anything less as charity.

The fascinating scenario here, of course, is that Yahoo way overpays, damaging itself fatally in the process and ends up being acquired by one of the others, probably Microsoft.

No wonder Ballmer pulled out of the bidding, he’s playing the long game.

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This is a sad one.  Venerable Yahoo, the original web portal, is in such trouble that it doesn’t know what to do.  So Yahoo will this year begin tearing itself apart.

This will be presented as a semblance of a strategy but I doubt that’s true.  More likely it will be the company attempting to maintain or even increase earnings by selling its seed corn. So look for Yahoo to dispose of its huge assets in China, to sell the part that it owns of Yahoo Japan, and to spin-off photo-sharing site Flickr as a separate company.

It will make the stock look great… for awhile.

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If you think AOL actually intends to buy Yahoo, you are wrong. That story hit the press this week but it’s a ruse to motivate Google exactly as I explained a few days ago. AOL has neither the money nor the motivation to buy Yahoo, which is analogous to a bus company buying a poorly-managed airline.  AOL just wants to make Google jealous.

Here’s what I think happened. This is pure speculation on my part, of course, but I know most of the players and am even correct from time to time. I think one or more private equity firms brought the deal to AOL: they’ll put up the capital if AOL’s Tim Armstrong will manage the combined company, putting Carol Bartz out of her misery at Yahoo. This is not a bad idea, per se, except it conflicts with AOL’s current strategy in that Google could probably get government approval to buy AOL because their businesses are so different, but that difference largely goes away if AOL buys search-heavy Yahoo.

If AOL abandons its Google-centric strategy (selling itself to Google), then buying Yahoo is fine. But they can’t have it both ways.

Why, then, is AOL apparently considering a play for Yahoo? I’m not sure they are, but if the talk continues my guess is it is to force Google’s hand.

This sort of thing happens all the time. Here’s an example of what I mean. A privately held U. S. company is in talks to be acquired, wants to be acquired, but the negotiation is taking too long or the numbers aren’t high enough. What’s to be done? They can give-in and accept the lower offer. They can walk away from the deal hoping the acquirer will come back with a higher offer to get talks going again. Or they can take what’s behind Door Number Three, which is registering for an IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Door Number Three is the smart move because, if successfully completed, that IPO will instantly double the eventual cost of acquiring that company at a later date. Acquirers that might have waited or deliberately slowed negotiations suddenly have to decide what the company is really worth to them and pay it, quickly.

I think that’s what’s happening here with AOL and Yahoo. There are some synergies, sure, but the potential deal has some real complications, too. Google doesn’t want Yahoo. Google might want AOL. AOL is certainly a lot cheaper for Google than buying Yahoo on almost any measure. So AOL is rushing the net, hoping to force the play on Google.

It should be interesting.

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Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen filed suit this week against a litany of Internet companies claiming they had violated patents awarded years ago to Allen’s now-defunct Interval Research. Many writers, including one passing himself off as me, claimed this made Allen a so-called “patent troll. ”

I don’t think that is the case.

Patent trolls are individuals or companies that habitually sue others over obscure patents. While the Interval patents generally are obscure, that doesn’t make them invalid. And the fact that Allen and then-partner Dave Liddle paid $100 million for the basic research behind those patents, well that hardly sounds like troll behavior.

If Paul Allen actually were a patent troll. he would have sued in South Texas, where all the whopping patent judgements are handed-down, not in Seattle.

Suing in Seattle is bad trollmanship.

What we have here is a guy who may be the 37th richest person in the world, but he used to be the second-richest. He’s pledged to give away his fortune and maybe wants more to give. In short, I don’t see a problem with these legal actions.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Allen will prevail. The odds are against him. While Interval developed upwards of 300 patents, that isn’t like the thousands of patents now controlled by Nathan Myrhvold’s company, Intellectual Ventures. Myrvold has acquired baskets of patents creating a strategic mass of IP and an associated legal team he can use to bludgeon almost any company into cross-licensing. Allen has no such depth (or power).

He’s just trying to turn lemons from lemonade.