Keeping up with the Joneses
May. 19th, 2010 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurMicrosoft has apparently decided to reassert its position as most-evil-company, against the recent competition from Apple -- according to this report from All About Microsoft, they've launched a broad patent-infringement suit against Salesforce. The particularly evil part is that most of the patents have nothing to do with CRM (which is what they're really competing on); instead, they mostly sound like the sort of insanely-broad and stupid patents that lead me to the opinion that software patents should just be banned. Some listed examples include things like:
“system and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu”
“method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display”
“aggregation of system settings into objects”
In other words, they've apparently got patents on a lot of pretty basic everyday concepts, and have decided to use them as competitive weapons. I don't know whether the patents are legitimate or not (I certainly hope not), but regardless, it just drives home how abusive and anti-competitive the whole patent regime is...
“system and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu”
“method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display”
“aggregation of system settings into objects”
In other words, they've apparently got patents on a lot of pretty basic everyday concepts, and have decided to use them as competitive weapons. I don't know whether the patents are legitimate or not (I certainly hope not), but regardless, it just drives home how abusive and anti-competitive the whole patent regime is...