by John Pavelka
Why is Google playing the Cold War patent game in the age of patent terrorism?
[Via RoughlyDrafted Magazine]
Seems hard to believe it was only one year ago that Google was rattling swords at its Google IO conference, comparing Apple and its iOS to North Korea while advancing Android 2.2 Froyo. What a difference a year makes. Now, rather than arrogantly bragging about how Android would crush and humiliate Apple’s axis of evil, Google has shifted into weeping about how other players in the mobile industry are threatening it with intellectual property claims.
[More]
Very nice read of where Google stands in the patent wars. Just like most generals, it is fighting the last wars – accumulate lots of patents in order to cross licesnse with other ‘superpowers’– while new modes of battle emerge – thousands of patent trolls.
The latter is best fought by forming consortiums to keep the patents out of the hands of trolls. Former enemies Apple and Microsoft do this to protect themselves and the industry. Google refuses to join the consortiums, to its detriment.
This, plus its apparent contempt for creating its own IP when it can steal someone else’s, puts Google in a very untenable position with respect to Android.
If you don’t like the geopolitical themed metaphor on this article, perhaps this one will suit better. It is not sugar-coated:
David Drummond, you are a pussy.
Larry, Sergey, you are pussies.
And I know why you’re such pussies. I know why you have monopoly profits in one business, use them to *destroy* other businesses, dominate the newest business (smartphones) and still whine like little whiny bitches.
Because Larry and Sergey, unlike Ballmer, Jobs, Gates and so many other tech rock stars — who had to fight battles, win wars and hack their way through to a new world — you went from high school to college to PhD to billionaire to multi billionaire.
You are pussies because, no matter how smart you are, which is no smarter than Bill Gates, you believe you have *earned* and *worked* to get to a point where Google is one of the richest companies in the world and you are among the richest people in the world.
Yes, you created the best search engine — for the time. And a method to monetize searches fell into your lap.
[snip]
While Apple and Microsoft and Nokia and Nortel and Blackberry and IBM and many others were actually *innovating* in smartphones and mobile technologies for over a decade you were busy making monopoly profits in a different market. Now you want into the big global smartphone market. And essentially want *all* the intellectual property of these companies to be effectively voided.
So you can continue to use your monopoly profits in a different business to kill off all the companies — all the innovators — and reap monopoly profits in this new business.
It is great to ‘Do no evil’ but if you are going to play with the big boys you have to have something better than beta copies of other’s work.
