Microsoft now all about cooperation? Yes, thanks to patents

All they want is to charge license fees for shonky patents, who'd a thought....

This effectively leaves upstarts in a lurch since, like the article states, they don't have a large patent portfolio they can leverage to cross-license. Instead, they gotta pay up!

Pull quotes from the article:

Quoting:He also calls IP "the single greatest wealth-creating asset of the modern corporation."

The word "wealth" is the giveaway. "Wealth" means on-the-books value like a stock portfolio or a real estate holding, before you sell it. I believe that's the modern sense of the word.

Quoting:Everyone else was welcome to partner with the new Microsoft, but Phelps quickly learned that many companies were wary of doing so. A big part of the reason was the "non-assertion of patents" clause that Bill Gates had dreamed up in 1993 and inserted into just about every Windows contract.

Wow! There's your de facto patent pool. The existence of a patent pool explains the long term lack of innovation. A recent research paper (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1308997) looks at historical evidence, and finds that innovation in the field of sewing machines ceased while a patent pool was in effect. Very nice for MSFT and all its hangers-on in the Windows Ecosystem, not so good for the rest of us.

Beware of patent pools, and other de facto devices to create oligopolies.

I take it ta meant nice for Microsoft, not that Microsoft was somehow being nice. Microsoft is always nice... to Microsoft's bottom line and nothing else.