Bonum Certa Men Certa

Nobody Knows How Much -- If Anything -- Microsoft Is Making From Android/Linux

Lloyd Blankfein Credit: Financial Times



Summary: So-called 'analysts', including some from Goldman Sachs, are serving Microsoft's FUD campaign by claiming that Microsoft makes billions of dollars from Android (without any proof)

IN ORDER TO scare companies and keep them away from Linux, Microsoft needs them to believe that Linux is somehow expensive, with the same going for Android and GNU. For a number of years now we have seen purely speculative reports which try to quantify costs that we know nothing about because Microsoft's racketeering operation makes secrecy part of the protection racket. This is a pattern of FUD which we are very familiar with, having seen it in the Novell era as well.



Right now we have yet another so-called 'genius' trying to tell us that he has an exclusive insight into the income of the racketeering operation. This serves nobody but the racketeering operation and it's not the first time that we see so-called 'analysts' doing this, sometimes even analysts close to Microsoft, including Goldman Sachs. It's always them, like marketers in suits. We urge people to ignore those so-called 'geniuses', who just like secret services [1] want us to sometimes believe that they have powerful and valuable inside knowledge, even when they're not inside-trading, which is against the law. According to Business 'Insider', "Microsoft is generating $2 billion per year in revenue from Android patent royalties, says Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund in a new note on the company."

What are his sources? Did Microsoft's racketeering operation tell him to write that? And is so, can it be believed? The Microsoft which was caught engaging in financial fraud after an employee had blown the whistle? It would be the perfect FUD. Only speculations are still being passed as 'fact' by some shallow sites that try to make Android look risky. We can recall many such examples, spanning at least 3 years (an early analyst's speculation was the cost of Android to HTC after a patent deal with Microsoft). Since Microsoft-hired lobbyists like Florian Müller play a significant role in relaying those numbers, we can safely suspect that there is agenda at hand. Previously, when he spread some FUD about payments from HTC to Apple, he was proven wrong by the head of HTC. Patent deals are as much about generating FUD as they are about generating income (if any). Microsoft, along with Apple, is generating Android FUD and suing Android by proxy now. That's a different thing.

Watch the type of stuff Apple is patenting right now:

Apple granted patent for location-based camera phone disabling



Last week I was frustrated in my attempt to take a screen grab of a frame from the cartoon Gravity Falls, which I was playing in iTunes on my Mac. The screen grab image showed the player window as gray-and-white checkerboard. Next, I downloaded a 3rd party screen grab application, and it gave me the same result. I ended up taking a photo of the iMac's display with my camera. (The photo is in this post -- it's the one with the cartoony occult symbols). Thanks to Apple's bullshit deal with the studios, the image has crappy video artifacts in it.


This type of patents from Apple were mentioned here before. Apple will help crush protests and also impede legal sharing of data. It is worse than DRM.

Speaking of DRM, Microsoft's allies at Netflix (deep links between those two companies) are going aggressive with patents, seeking a ban (through the ITC) of something which is not even a physical product. "A trade commission investigated Netflix, although it imports nothing," Joe Mullin correctly pointed out. Perhaps we'll return to covering patents like we used to (not enough time/resources), but this is just another example of software patents doing their damage.

Related/contextual items from the news:



  1. BUGGER
    It is a belief that has been central to much of the journalism about spying and spies over the past fifty years. That the anonymous figures in the intelligence world have a dark omniscience. That they know what's going on in ways that we don't.

    It doesn't matter whether you hate the spies and believe they are corroding democracy, or if you think they are the noble guardians of the state. In both cases the assumption is that the secret agents know more than we do.




Recent Techrights' Posts

GNU/Linux Adoption in Africa, a Passageway Towards Freedom From Neo-Colonialism
Digi(tal)-Colonialism and/or Techolonialism are a thing. Can Africa flee the trap?
 
There's Nothing "Funny" About Attacking Free Speech and Software Freedom
persistent focus on the principal issues is very important
Professor Eben Moglen Explained How Software Patent Threats Had Changed Around 2014 (Alice Case) and What Would Happen Till 2025
clip aged reasonably well
CNN Contributes to Demolition of the Open Web
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Eben Moglen on Encryption and Anonymity
The alternate net we need, and how we can build it ourselves
Yet More Microsofters Inside the Board of Mozilla (Which Has Just Outsourced Firefox Development to Microsoft's Proprietary Prison)
Do you want a browser controlled (and spied on) by such a company?
IRC Proceedings: Monday, December 04, 2023
IRC logs for Monday, December 04, 2023
GNU/Linux Now Exceeds 3.6% Market Share on Desktops/Laptops, According to statCounter
things have changed for Windows in China
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news
Links 05/12/2023: Debt Brake in Germany and Layoffs at Condé Nast (Reddit, Wired, Ars Technica and More)
Links for the day
[Meme] Social Control Media Giants Shaping Debates on BSDs and GNU/Linux
listening to random people in Social Control Media
Reddit (Condé Nast), Which Has Another Round of Layoffs This Month, Incited People Against GNU/Linux Users (Divide and Rule, It's 2003 All Over Again!)
Does somebody (perhaps a third party) fan the flames?
Who Will Hold the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Accountable for Taking Bribes From Microsoft and Selling Out to Enable/Endorse Massive Copyright Infringement?
it does Microsoft advocacy
Using Gemini to Moan About Linux and Spread .NET
Toxic, acidic post in Gemini
Web Monopolist, Google, 'Pulls a Microsoft' by Hijacking/Overriding the Name of Competitor and Alternative to the Web
Gulag 'hijacking' 'Gemini'
Links 04/12/2023: Mass Layoffs at Spotify (Debt, Losses, Bubble) Once Again
Links for the day
ChatGPT Hype/Vapourware (and 'Bing') Has Failed, Google Maintains Dominance in Search
a growing mountain of debt and crises
[Meme] Every Real Paralegal Knows This
how copyright law works
Forging IRC Logs and Impersonating Professors: the Lengths to Which Anti-Free Software Militants Would Go
Impersonating people in IRC, too
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, December 03, 2023
IRC logs for Sunday, December 03, 2023
GNU/Linux Popularity Surging, So Why Did MakeUseOf Quit Covering It About 10 Days Ago?
It's particularly sad because some of the best articles about GNU/Linux came from that site, both technical articles and advocacy-centric pieces
Links 04/12/2023: COVID-19 Data Misused Again, Anti-Consumerism Activism
Links for the day
GNOME Foundation is in Reliable Hands (Executive Director)
Growing some good in one's garden
Links 03/12/2023: New 'Hey Hi' (AI) Vapouware and Palantir/NHS Collusion to Spy on Patients Comes Under Legal Challenge
Links for the day
'Confidential Computing'? More Like a Giant Back Door.
CacheWarp AMD CPU Attack Grants Root Access in Linux VMs
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, December 02, 2023
IRC logs for Saturday, December 02, 2023
Links 03/12/2023: CRISPR as Patented Minefield, Lots of Greenwashing Abound
Links for the day