Nothing is ever exactly as it seems in the business of technology and that certainly applies to AOL’s recent patent auction, won by Microsoft with a bid of $1.056 billion. This event wasn’t really an auction and had little to do with patents, yet it probably marks the peak of the current patent bubble.
On the face of it, AOL selling its 800 patents to Microsoft was about raising cash for the troubled online company, allowing it to pass some of that money on to disgruntled shareholders in the form of a one-time dividend or share buy-back. And the patents were substantial, since they included not just AOL’s own productivity but also that of Netscape, Mirabilis (ICQ), and any other AOL acquisitions over the years. […]
Once DOS became the de facto PC desktop standard in the 1980s, Microsoft perfected a technique called “embrace and extend” and sometimes “embrace, extend, and extinguish.” The idea was to adopt outside technologies, extend DOS to include them, then eliminate as a competitor the original developer of the technology. This was before Microsoft figured out that it actually needed third-party developers.
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.
Steve Ballmer has always been nice to me. I can’t say we have much of a relationship, but the half dozen times I have interviewed him have always gone well and he tries to please, which I appreciate. But (there’s always a but, isn’t there?) Ballmer has failed at Microsoft and I believe 2012 will see him replaced as Redmond’s CEO.
This Christmas I added a Windows server to our home network because my kids were finding some favorite programs were unplayable over their RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) thin clients. So I bought a very inexpensive Windows 7 desktop and for $89 at Walmart added Microsoft’s Anytime Upgrade to Windows 7 Professional, which is needed to support remote RDP desktops. No luck with the RDP deployment so far, though, because MICROSOFT’S ANYTIME UPGRADE WEB SITE HAS BEEN DOWN FOR THE LAST TWO DAYS.