In the beginning of 2008 TomTom traded at 70 euro per stock on the Dutch stockmarket. Now they are worth 3 euro per stock. Microsoft is hitting hard on a company that is already in the drain. How can TomTom afford to defend themselves after a disaster year like 2008 was for them? Microsoft has got money for sure, and with this economy everyone will be scared to step up against Microsoft. They are using the economic climate to bully the entire industry (remember TomTom is just one company, they used blackmail to extract license fee’s from many companies before this).

Soon MS will monopolize the patent trolling business. I hope people will react to this and create a new better faster light-weight FS sort of like what happened with the GIF -> PNG transition (and which is happening right now with the OGG revolution driven by Wikipedia and Mozilla).