Hot Damn, Microsoft!
Folks are estimating Microsoft will rake in a cool $3.4 billion this year on Android licensing deals. Wow. That’s 20% of the company’s 2012 income. Others guestimate they’ll be making upwards of nine billion a year from their Android-related operations by 2017 which is over half their 2012 take.
A critic might note the irony of all this near-priceless intellectual property behind phone design contrasting with Microsoft’s flaccid inability to compete with phones of their own, but I’d prefer to offer my compliments to their legal team. They devised a system that makes a ton of scratch change hands perpetually and at an accelerating rate, a lot of which (most of which?) comes from foreign pockets. That’s great for Microsoft shareholders (like me), it’s probably helpful to Nokia, it’s good for the GDP, for the country and, unless this is all a zero sum game with nothing of actual utility contributed anywhere, the world too.
High five, Horacio Gutierrez, and however many others are at your side fighting the good fight. Bravo!
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About The Author
Doug Simmons
Biographical info.. hmm. I have a history of not being able to strike the balance between what is "safe" to put into these forms and what is, in my mind at least, funny. Can't do it.
So not only washing microsofts balls but your a patent troll fanboy now too huh.. nice..
Hit this chief, http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/10/updated-lists-of-android-patent.html and welcome to the big leagues. You should thank Microsoft for not crushing all these misguided OEMs altogether, instead offering them a pretty generous way out of trouble.
Hey man, they’re just defending their innovations, don’t hate on them because of all the thieves out there (cough Google) have been successful at making Microsoft all this cheddar.
Wow,that’s a lot of cash.
Simmons welcome to the Dark side OS League of AWESOMENESS
Hi Simmons, I thought you were just a Google fanboy/copybot, but I just realized you’re naive. You are praising Microsoft on top and pulling rugs beneath it. I think ZDNet’s only revenue generating troll with his nonsensical articles on the subject he doesn’t know, SJVN, should learn that from you.
You can’t hide your disdain for the fact that MS is actually doing what their supposed to do when another company is doing things they shouldn’t do.
But at the same time I’m sure if it were somehow the other way around your disdain would be replaced with pure chrome logo colored “elation” splattered all over your chromebook pixel screen.
But whatever you see as MS’s inability to sell phones, I mean beyond it just being flat out stupid it is just wrong. Unfortunately people like you seem to only be motivated by the charts provided by your favorite chart creating site. So I’ll just say stay tuned…
Sean, I wasn’t trying to hide it; the first guy who commented missed the snide tone. I thought it was obvious when cranking this unremarkable bit out.
I asked you to produce that list of patents not because I didn’t think it existed but because I was genuinely curious what Android was doing that was wrong or illegal. You produced the list, I read it, it’s difficult to deny now that there is infringement on what the article claimed were enforceable patents. I learned something because of you. My mind is a bit open here. And I’m glad to see Google sort of untying itself from Android with iOS and hopefully Windows Phone.
I don’t own a Chromebook by the way. The only Google thing I automatically buy is the Nexus phone line. They tend not to let me down.
The inability to sell phones was a cheap shot I admit but it’s odd that you cannot admit that it’s indeed at least figuratively accurate – the whole thing’s been somewhere between flop and slow burner. To Nokia shareholders lately, a “road to hell.”
I’m amazed by your ability, you and everyone in your camp, to just stay tuned for that liftoff. I’ve read a remark like that countless times year after year of lack of traction, the any month now stuff, just you wait. I guess that says something very positive about Microsoft and the platform, it’s just that good that you’ll tolerate an irritant like its perpetual obscurity indefinitely, and so vocally and tenaciously. You can’t make people operate like that if your software’s junk. And I’ve never disputed that Windows Phone isn’t a top shelf high caliber piece of work. I’ve done the opposite. It just seems that it takes more than a superior product for that product to grab the success it deserves. That’s dismaying.
Honestly. I want Windows Phone to break on through, say, a 20% share of the market. I want to see that on my favorite pie chart creating site. On my mother’s eyes, Sean, I want Microsoft to succeed, especially Windows Phone, and also Nokia. I’m a fan.
But not a fan of their prolific litigious efforts.