>>MS's challenge now is that you can't be a gatekeeper in today's online world. There no longer is a gate for them to guard. Even if they can persuade authorities to regiment the internet, still people will find their own ways to circumvent assisted by the likes of Google, Apple and Chinese manufacturers of whom we've hardly heard in the First World - yet.
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>They do hold the gate, but are in the danger of ending on some funny video, guarding the gate when the wall is gone.
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>>The big issue now is that IBM patents often involve real inventions into materials sciences or methodologies that otherwise would not exist and certainly can't be figured on the back of a paper towel. This contrasts with software/IT patents that tend to be small iterations and/or are obvious in man-made areas of IT where there are few rules of nature to underpin amazing new discoveries and where patents often are weaponized to prevent competition rather than driving progress. Compare patents over the shape of a phone's corners or the way the screen is swiped, to patents for a new type of computer memory or for hard drive manufacture techniques that improve reliability (both of which came from IBM) and you can see the difference. Whether MS can transform itself to create patents like IBM seems doubtful and consumer pressure to do away with software patent weaponization is growing all over the world. It'll be an own goal for MS if it tries to block that. JMHO.
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>Most of these software patents are ridiculous. But then, Sturgeon's law applies to other areas as well.


>>Compare patents over the shape of a phone's corners
Many of my IBM buddies from the 60's told me that the engineer who decided to round the corners on the punched card was generally regarded within IBM as having the most brilliant insight of his time.
Rounding the corners saved millions of pounds of paper, cut shipping costs, and reduced jams exponentially.
A total win-win.