AN aggressive patent strategy is what's left at Microsoft because, according to a new survey shared here last night and this morning, "businesses are moving to Linux far faster than they are to Windows or Unix." Some years ago Microsoft funded a copyright lawsuit against Linux -- a challenge that fell flat on its face but bought Microsoft some more time. Well, time's up and as Microsoft takes on debt it is also building a patent portfolio rather than decent products. Microsoft has just been awarded a patent for graphics chip video encoding, according to a new report:
Companies ranging from Microsoft, Apple, AMD, and Nvidia have all worked for years to tap into graphics cards for certain kinds of non-gaming processing tasks, an approach typically referred to as GPU computing. Growing ever more prevalent, GPU computing has made its way to Web browsers, Photoshop, as well as both recent versions of Apple's and Microsoft's operating systems. That's why we were so surprised by ConceivablyTech's report today that Microsoft has been awarded a patent for GPU-Accelerated video encoding.
Ellison made the comments in response to a shareholder question about his remarks last month during Oracle's financial analyst meeting. At that time, Ellison said, "You could see us buy a chip company."
"My point really was that we are interested in buying intellectual property of all kinds," Ellison said at the Wednesday meeting at Oracle's headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif., indicating that his remarks had set off a lot of speculation.