Trolling for Dollars

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen filed suit this week against a litany of Internet companies claiming they had violated patents awarded years ago to Allen’s now-defunct Interval Research. Many writers, including one passing himself off as me, claimed this made Allen a so-called “patent troll. ”

I don’t think that is the case.

Patent trolls are individuals or companies that habitually sue others over obscure patents. While the Interval patents generally are obscure, that doesn’t make them invalid. And the fact that Allen and then-partner Dave Liddle paid $100 million for the basic research behind those patents, well that hardly sounds like troll behavior.

If Paul Allen actually were a patent troll. he would have sued in […]

By |August 31st, 2010|2010|28 Comments
Read More

Mobile 2010 Predictions: Apple, Google & RIM, Oh My!

Near the eve of Apple’s tablet announcement, I’d like to turn my 2010 predictive eye again to the mobile space where, as my title suggests, there are only three software players that matter — Apple, Google, and RIM (Blackberry).

But wait a minute, isn’t Nokia the big Kahuna in this space and aren’t they right now suing the heck out of Apple? Yes, but that’s an act of desperation, a stalling tactic intended just to slow Apple down or, possibly, send some useful license revenue from Cupertino to Finland. It doesn’t change the inevitable.

So-called “feature phones” are going away, to be replaced within two product cycles (three years, tops) entirely by smart phones […]

By |January 22nd, 2010|2010|152 Comments
Read More

Microsoft 2010 SP1

This should be my 2010 predictions column and it is, sort of, but if you’ve noticed I’m writing shorter columns these days but posting more frequently. There’s no way I can do a comprehensive predictions column in less than 3000 words. So what I propose to do instead is to write several prediction columns today, tomorrow, and maybe even the next day, covering in some depth what I think is happening and where we are going in the coming year as a technological culture. This first 2010 prediction column deals with Microsoft.

In the simplest terms what we’ll see from Microsoft in 2010 is more of the same. The company will continue to […]

By |January 7th, 2010|2010|108 Comments
Read More

New Improved MS Word 2007!

Now that Microsoft has lost its appeal (ain’t that the truth) and has to pay $290 million to Canadian company i4i and take the docx file format out of Word 2007, is it just me or doesn’t that sound like an improvement to the product?

The whole point of docx didn’t seem to be to help users, but rather to make life difficult for both Microsoft competitors and for users who decided not to upgrade from the previous Word versions that used only the .doc format.

Microsoft deserves to lose this one.

By |December 22nd, 2009|2009|91 Comments
Read More

Chrome and Chrome, What is Chrome?

Last week Google made a preemptive strike against Microsoft, revealing details of its Chrome OS months before that product reaches its near-infinite beta release.  The idea is simple: who needs a big OS if you are doing everything in a browser?  It’s a huge threat to Microsoft and Apple.  But then it struck me I’ve heard this all before, so I went back and found this video clip from my show Triumph of the Nerds, circa 1996, where Larry Ellison predicts the future, not knowing he was actually describing 2010.


The biggest news was simply that Google was finally taking Microsoft head-on. The rest of the news, at least to me, was that Microsoft should be worried, very worried.

While […]

By |November 24th, 2009|2009|156 Comments
Read More