Nortel Networks, the bankrupt Canadian telecom company, came that much closer to disappearing completely yesterday with the cash sale of its portfolio of 6000 patents for $4.5 billion to a consortium of companies including Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion (RIM), and Sony. The bidding, which began with a $900 million offer from Google, went far higher than most observers expected and only ended, I’m guessing, when Google realized that Apple and its partners had deeper pockets and would have paid anything to win. This transaction is a huge blow to Google’s Android platform, which was precisely the consortium’s goal.
Google is the youngest of these companies and has probably the smallest patent portfolio, most […]
Microsoft last week bought just over 600,000 IP addresses (a /10 block and a /11 block if you are counting) for $7.5 million from bankrupt Nortel. For a moment there it was everywhere on the web, a mild reminder of what happens during famine when gluttons hoard food. But what is really going-on here, and what does it mean in the near and longer terms? Well first let’s settle something: it is immaterial to Microsoft. Had the price been $7.5 billion or better yet $75 billion, I’d say that Redmond viewed as central to its survival having that block of addresses. But $7.5 million is pocket change and probably represents to Microsoft just a cheaper […]