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07.26.16

The Death of Software Patents and Microsoft’s Coup Against Yahoo! Made the Company Worthless

Posted in America, Microsoft, Patents at 5:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Microsoft has swallowed everything it could from within Yahoo!

“Bartz says search engine Bing unlikely to make significant mark”

–MarketWatch (June 2009)

Summary: A look at what happens to companies whose value is a house of software patents rather than code and a broad base of users/customers

QUINN (Watchtroll), who does not know how software works, is actually one of the most vocal proponents of software patents out there. He can also be quite rude when he doesn't get his way. Watch how Watchtroll bemoans being rejected over a bogus software patent application, then calling the process “bogus” (blaming/hating the game, not the player). Benjamin Henrion politely asked him: “Which part of abstract you don’t understand?”

As we have been showing here since 2014, Alice is having a profound effect on software patenting in the US and this new blog post looks into how Alice eliminates software patents (or does not). As one might expect, the legal profession only focuses on the rare cases where software patents somehow survive scrutiny (they hope to replicate the outcome).

“There is so much at stake here (billions if not a trillion dollars across all companies).”Curiously enough — albeit not too shockingly — since Monday morning we have been seeing a lot of articles about the sale of Yahoo! (there were rumours about it over the weekend). Journalists are rewriting the recent history of Yahoo! and omitting the role of Microsoft in killing Yahoo. A few months ago people noted that Alice would significantly reduce the value of Yahoo, but what about the damage caused by Microsoft, reducing the bidding price for the company by almost 90%? This new article titled “Yahoo, Verizon Deal Clears Way for Patent Sale” says that “Yahoo’s sale of its core internet business to Verizon on Monday opens the door for the company’s next major step — the sale of more than 3,000 granted and pending patents covering e-commerce, search and other components of the modern web.”

It also noted that Alice “resulted in many software patents being thrown out. Many top tech firms also already have cross-licensing deals with Yahoo, so a firm purchasing the patents would face barriers to monetizing them.”

One has to wonder how much of their value companies like IBM and Microsoft lost after Alice. There is so much at stake here (billions if not a trillion dollars across all companies). The bubble has burst. █

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