Saturday, May 28, 2011

Another Signpost on the Long Slow Decline

-- or --

"General Motors is not in the business of making cars. It is in the business of making money," repurposed for the 21st century.




The headline of this Preston Gralla post says something to me …

Microsoft's biggest mobile money-maker is Android, not Windows Phone 7

… and the lede speaks volumes:

Microsoft may be spending enormous amount of money and development effort on Windows Phone 7, but for now, it's making more money off of Android than it is from Windows Phone 7. So says Citi analyst Walter Pritchard in a just-released report.

Gizmodo says that according to Pritchard's report, Microsoft gets five times as much money from Android than it does from Windows Phone 7, because of a settlement in an intellectual property infringement case against HTC.

When a company is making most of its money through IP shakedowns Consistently Taking A Proactive Approach To Licensing To Resolve IP Infringement And Continuing To Develop Programs That Make It Possible To Access Its IP Portfolio … ugh. Sometimes there are no words.

And yes, given who we're talking about here, I feel confident in assuming this particular bit of "intellectual property" is something that only a corporate lawyer would not call ridiculous, and that HTC figured they'd lose less blood putting up with the parasite than trying to excise it. The idea of Microsoft actually creating something of worth from scratch … has very few precedents in their history, let us say. Especially the recent history. You do remember how they got Bing to work, right?

Hey, Steve Ballmer. Sue this:

(alt. video link)

8 comments:

M. Bouffant said...

I'm starting to believe I should have sucked up to Gates & Allen in high school.

Or strangled them.

bjkeefe said...

Had you done the former, you could have gotten to wear one of those cool FYIV t-shirts that all the cool kids on the Microsoft campus used to wear to show how cool they were.

The latter makes an interesting alternate history to contemplate, doesn't it? But, first, Allen did do some good things with his money (and even Gates has been okay about this lately, too), and second, if they weren't around, we'd probably all just be hating on Mitch Kapor or Larry Ellison or Scott McNealy or someone like that instead.

bjkeefe said...

The one you wanted to get, back in the day, is the guy pictured in the post. As far as I can tell, he has no redeeming qualities.

Substance McGravitas said...

I'd rather have hated on other people because Windows has been such an icky mish-mash of code. The world would have been better if it had had the MacOS to hate.

Substance McGravitas said...

And hey, I don't do Facebook so I dunno how the articles appear there, but having editors who will sign their goddamned names seems like a useful thing.

bjkeefe said...

Not sure what you mean, Sub. They do, more or less, on Wikipedia.

Not sure where you come down on the pseudonym question, but to my mind, that's a perfectly good name for purposes such as editing Wikipedia or posting online more generally. And, of course, Wikipedia keeps track of IP addresses and has all sorts of notification and rollback functionality, too.

M. Bouffant said...

I understand Ellison is very much worth hating.

I see Ballmer was in the Detroit equivalent of the Lakeside School for Boys. Not repsonsible!

bjkeefe said...

Agreed on first. Mystified on second. Maybe I will Google tomorrow or something, when I am not so hot and irritated.

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