05.19.10
Confirmatory Signs That Microsoft is Dying: It’s Suing Companies for Patent Violations, Unprovoked
Summary: Microsoft is like Japan in World War 2, needlessly awakening giants by crashing patents into pacific cruisers (starting with Salesforce)
IT IS OFTEN said, based on experience, that companies resort to bullying and sometimes suing with patents when they have little or nothing else left. There are many examples, but we won’t delve into them today.
Microsoft has been scaring away many potential partners because of its aggressive behaviour which more recently included racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
“At a later stage we will look at whether GNU/Linux is affected here (Microsoft does not name it).”Microsoft not only engages in extortion in order to sign some deals of submission. Those barks did end up in biting. Microsoft, for example, sued TomTom after it had already sued some other companies over patents (without provocation).
Microsoft is now suing Salesforce, one of the louder critics of Microsoft [1, 2, 3]. At a later stage we will look at whether GNU/Linux is affected here (Microsoft does not name it). The following post contains the list of patents:
Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against Salesforce.com, alleging that the CRM company is infringing on nine of its patents. The move is somewhat surprising, as this is only the fourth time that Microsoft has sued another company for patent violations (though it has been the target of plenty of them).
The death of SCO too began with lawsuits. Such lawsuits usually come about when one cannot compete. In this case, Microsoft reveals its inability to compete online, where it loses money at the pace of roughly $3 billion per year. █
