
Microsoft Is Getting Rich on Android - ytNumbers
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/07/19/microsoft-is-getting-rich-on-android.aspx
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clarky07
While it is funny that they make more on android, they are hardly "getting
rich" off it. 100 mil for msft is peanuts. It doesn't move the needle.

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tanzam75
Microsoft had net income of $5 billion last quarter. $100 million isn't
"getting rich," but it is 2% of net income.

Granted, it's a smaller percentage of net revenues than of net income. But
patent licenses are essentially pure profit, right? You're not doing the R&D
for the purpose of getting patent licensing revenue.

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fnordfnordfnord
It's a hundred million more than they deserve for that patent.

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nivla
Does anyone know what patents are claimed by Microsoft on Android? Is it one
for FAT16/32? Correct me if I am wrong but isn't FAT16/32 Microsoft's
proprietary format? So why is it wrong for them to put a claim on it? Wouldn't
Apple do the same?

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beagle3
FAT goes back to CPM, maybe even farther (long before Microsoft, and any
patents on the original would have expired 20 years ago, and there weren't
software patents back then). The extension from FAT12 to FAT16 and FAT32 is
trivial.

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Someone
IIRC, CP/M had 8.3 file names, ctrl-Z terminated text files, and drive
letters, but its on-disk structures where totally different. That certainly
was the case when comparing it to FAT versions that allow for subdirectories
(CP/M did not have subdirectories)

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beagle3
I had used, in 1984, a CP/M version that had FAT, so I assumed it went to the
origins of CP/M. It doesn't, and credit for the original design _does_ go to
Microsoft in 1977.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT_file_system#Historical_evol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT_file_system#Historical_evolution)

The point still stands though: any patent protection for the original
implementation would have expired before 1997, which is more than 15 years
ago. And it shouldn't have received (in fact, didn't receive) patent
protection.

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guard-of-terra
The idea Microsoft gets money from Android devices despite not doing anything
other than stiffling innovation for the last ten years makes me want ppl in
Microsoft have bad stuff happening to them.

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mslot
Stifling innovation? Microsoft was developing software for mobile devices more
than 10 years before Google did and for a long time it was the main driver
behind the market for PDA/smart phone components (e.g., colour/touch screens,
ARM CPUs).

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guard-of-terra
They sort of parked their mobile devices progress in the same sense they tried
to park IE forever at version 6 and Windows at version XP.

I guess they figured out they no longer have to innovate now when all the
market was theirs following the fall of (Netscape, Mac & other OSes, Palm).

And when iPhone came the whole Windows Mobile thing imploded like a house of
cards.

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lttlrck
You cannot compare the failure of Windows Mobile to IE6. The situation created
by IE6 popularity was in all likelyhood a fluke, I am not sure Microsoft had a
grand nefarious plan that they successfully executed at all. Besides without
IE6 we would have most likely had to wait longer for Firefox and Chrome.

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guard-of-terra
I don't think it's a grand nefarous plan.

They just thought that they made it. That all the revolutions of desktop
browsing (or PDA OSes) are over, and what they have to do until the end of
eternity is introducing small evolutionary changes while preserving reverse
compatibility.

And that they did. But they were wrong, browsing revolution happened which
left IE6, 7 and partially 8 in the dust. Mobile happened, which made them
throw away all the Windows Mobile and make it from scratch.

They were not ready to innovate by writing heroic projects fast and tried to
persuade market that glacial is okay from now.

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codex
Google's somewhat foolish acquisition of Motorola would begin to show some
dividends if they could leverage Motorola's patents to force a cross licensing
agreement which didn't involve paying these fees.

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melling
This is unfortunate for Android but consumers are still much better off by
having a 3rd major operating system. I really hope Android(or Chrome/Android)
becomes a viable desktop solution.

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kevingadd
Aren't these numbers ignoring the possibility that some of those Windows Phone
revenues are from app/game purchases on the Windows Phone store?

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manojlds
We don't even know for sure how much Nokia pays for licensing Windows Phone,
do we?

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codex
Microsoft is pumping cash into Nokia, not the other way around.

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mtgx
That doesn't necessarily mean Nokia isn't paying a license fee. Also Microsoft
is paying Nokia for using its maps, so I'm not sure how far the "freebies" go,
on either side.

