HTC pays Microsoft $5 for every Android phone

So they pass a negligible 5.00 cost onto the customer and it's business as usual. No law suits, no patent claims...they pay the extortion and move along.

Sure it's wrong on almost every level and we should all be outraged...but are any of us surprised?

MS does this stuff because it can. Somehow, I find satisfaction that Microsoft has relegated itself to chief patent troll. They're grasping at any revenue opportunity now.

Although.... I was at a function the other night where a group of people were entertained for hours by the Kinect. Seemed like a decent piece of hardware. Not sure what sales are doing for the overall MS profit picture, but it appears to be doing well for them. Shame they have run a protection racket on the side to make it.

Some number-crunching on the license fees reveals a shocker.

Florian Mueller wrote:Top five companies asserting IP against Android have collective market cap of $734 billion

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/05/top-five-companies-a...

In some ways it's not terribly surprising.

Android is rapidly becoming huge and who wouldn't want a piece of that pie?

Thom Holwerda wrote:As I have already said numerous times on OSNews: this is mafia behaviour. Microsoft is basically bullying Android device makers into paying protection money, probably with the goal of making this protection money about as much as the cost of a Windows Phone 7 license. Horace Dediu did some quick maths, and came to the conclusion that Microsoft earns more from HTC's Android devices than it does form its own Windows Phone 7; Microsoft has admitted selling 2 million WP7 licenses, and assuming a price of $15 per license, that's $30 million in revenue. Using the rough estimate of 30 million HTC android devices, you come to the conclusion that Android earns Microsoft more than WP7.

http://www.osnews.com/story/24800/Microsoft_Earns_More_from_...