Ballmer Makes Me Laugh: Says Android isn't free... Because You Pay Them

[New2u]

fwiw, a settlement establishes no precedent in another proceeding. virtually all settlements expressly state that there is no admission of any wrongdoing. the suit between Moto and MS will be decided on whether or not there has, in fact, been any infringement - HTC's settlement will have no bearing on it.

HTC didn't settle, there was no lawsuit. HTC agreed that there was patent infringement, and agreed to pay a licencing fee, so while that may not create a legal precedent, it does offer strong evidence in favor of Microsoft.

Also, I highly doubt that the Microsoft legal team takes it's cues from the marketing department, and I really don't think Microsoft cares if Motorola makes phones for them, as they already have two of the best phone manufacturers (htc and samsung) making phones for them. The LG phone doesn't seem too shabby either.

Not necessarily, just because HTC would rather not fight another legal battle doesn't mean too much. They could have easily weighed the options and found that paying MS for something they might be held liable for in court is cheaper then paying twice-three times that amount to fight it in court. You might remember HTC's legal battle with Apple, i'm sure that weighed alittle in their decision on what is the best course of action for their shareholders.

As stated many times when HTC was getting sued by Apple, that intellectual property rights are hard to get a court reading on, the reason for this is that the patent office was handing out patents on intellectual property like candy for anyone who would submit them the money, never checking on other like items.

A precedent that would be hard for MS to get around would be if they actually contacted them long time prior to this about them using their product as MS claims. One thing that is bad is that if MS saw them using "their" product and just sat on it, if they immediately contacted all companies involved and said hey either pay us or stop using it, then that is one thing, but if they sat on it and now are saying well we want you to pay us for something you've been using for a year now. The problem with sitting on it is that it shows that they didn't care in the first place about their intellectual rights to the product. Easy to say at that point they are only doing it to try to drop sales of android or every scare a manufacturer into not making a product or holding off on it's release. As seen apple tried many tactics against android for that exact reason.

 

[Inkarnit]

In regards to companies thriving due to having the best product... There are several examples of technologies that were superior not being the ones to survive due to one reason or another. I am in a hurry and don't have time to do all the research, but off the top of my head I can recall competition in media recording technologies where the best product didn't necessarily win. Cylinder records vs disk records, lateral vs vertical hill and dale groove cutting in 78rpm records, LP vs EP records, 8-track vs cassette tapes, Crosby system vs GE/Zenith system of FM broadcasting, VHS vs Betamax, CED vs LaserDisc vs VHD, Dolby vs Dbx, AGP vs PCI, DVD vs DIVX, the various flash formats, DVD+R vs DVD-R, Blu-ray vs HD DVD... In all those instances the best format did not necessarily come out on top. Internal business politics and whatnot drove some lesser formats to win out. Just because Android may be the best OS out there does not mean it will be the winner.

 

[Darkseider]

The only thing Ballsack is good for is a laugh. The man is a complete idiot and his actions show more now than ever that Microsoft is desperate. They have a failed mobile platform and are now looking to launch into a mobile market that has two of the hottest products on the planet, those being Android and as much as I hate to say it iOS4. They have tried this tactic with Linux distributors and have gained some success because Novell is a bunch of pansies. RedHat's response was much more appropriate, put up or shut up. Not surprisingly MS shut up because they know it is all FUD and saber rattling just like this latest FUD attack on OEMs making Android handsets. HTC caved first which is a shame. Hopefully Motorola sticks to their guns and follows RedHat's lead and tells MS to piss off. Now it's time to grab the popcorn and watch the dancing monkey scream and throw chairs as WP7 fails and flails like its' dead next of "Kin".

 

[Darkseider]

Why is microsoft even bothering with a mobile phone OS again? They have never captured significant market share with their OS - they can barely manage to do the one thing they are supposed to do (pc operating system) correctly. What they should be very very scared of is Google entering the PC OS market and handing Microsoft their asses.
As to the lawsuit -this is just more big boi bullying - they all do it. Apple sues everyone, MS sues everyone, it has nothing to do with whether they will gain or lose market share - it's just another way to make money.
Just look at the RIAA - pretty soon lawsuits will be their only source of income..........

Microsofts mobile platforms do suck, but there is no way anyone will beat them in the PC OS market for the next 10 years atleast. I would bet the farm that atleast 80% of droidforum users use Windows.

I don't understand how anyone could fault MS for protecting their investment.

MS isn't protecting anything. They haven't developed, invented, innovated or created ANYTHING on their own. MS litigates it doesn't innovate they also have the "Three E" mantra

Embrace, Extended, Extinguish

They have done this with SO many products and companies they either purchased and/or litigated into extinction. Ooh and by protecting their product do you mean, for example, the code they wrote into Windows 95 that would cause Netscape to FAIL and crash in order to push their own bug ridden security swiss cheese browser to the top? Again MS is a BS software/technology company that hasn't given the tech community anything substantial, EVER. They are expert marketers and litigators. Nothing else. For the good of the technology world in general Microsoft and to a lesser extent Intel/AMD need to just go away. Legacy x86 processors running bloated and bug ridden OS's made by MS just add to the stale PC ecosystem.

 

[kepley]

Has a "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" post been made yet?

 

[jroc]

^LMAO!! That is one of the funniest clips ever...

The only thing Ballsack is good for is a laugh. The man is a complete idiot and his actions show more now than ever that Microsoft is desperate. They have a failed mobile platform and are now looking to launch into a mobile market that has two of the hottest products on the planet, those being Android and as much as I hate to say it iOS4. They have tried this tactic with Linux distributors and have gained some success because Novell is a bunch of pansies. RedHat's response was much more appropriate, put up or shut up. Not surprisingly MS shut up because they know it is all FUD and saber rattling just like this latest FUD attack on OEMs making Android handsets. HTC caved first which is a shame. Hopefully Motorola sticks to their guns and follows RedHat's lead and tells MS to piss off. Now it's time to grab the popcorn and watch the dancing monkey scream and throw chairs as WP7 fails and flails like its' dead next of "Kin".

Exactly. I remember when that happened and it scared me into grabbing any Linux OS I could, fearing free Linux OS's were about to be no more. It kinda looks like de ja vue with HTC being Novll. Hopefully it will be de ja vue 100% in this case....

 

[Wetzilla]

A precedent that would be hard for MS to get around would be if they actually contacted them long time prior to this about them using their product as MS claims. One thing that is bad is that if MS saw them using "their" product and just sat on it, if they immediately contacted all companies involved and said hey either pay us or stop using it, then that is one thing, but if they sat on it and now are saying well we want you to pay us for something you've been using for a year now. The problem with sitting on it is that it shows that they didn't care in the first place about their intellectual rights to the product. Easy to say at that point they are only doing it to try to drop sales of android or every scare a manufacturer into not making a product or holding off on it's release. As seen apple tried many tactics against android for that exact reason.

They reached the deal with HTC about 6 months ago Microsoft signs Android patent deal with HTC | Reuters . I don't think they were sitting on the lawsuit until now, they were just trying to get licencing deals from the other companies, and when it became clear Motorola wasn't going to do it, they decided to sue. Now, they may have decided not to sue Samsung and LG yet because they do license windows phone 7 and didn't want to piss them off, but i doubt this was a push to get Motorola to change mobile OSes.

 

[brando56894]

I don't see a problem with Microsoft doing this because at the end of the day it's about a business making money. If the positions were swapped Google would do the same thing.

Seriously? While lawsuits are commonplace in the US nowadays, I don't think they are normally used for this reason. Android has been gaining ground rapidly for about a year now, and yet MS just decided to do this now. They could have done this in the past if they wanted to, but they do it now to try to leverage a favorable market position.

Do you really think Google would have done the same? I'm not saying Google is perfect - I'm just saying this isn't something every company would have done this. Normally companies gain a favorable market position by making a favorable product.

I agree completely with Pandemic, I dont think google would do this if they were in the same situation, since google has shown themselves to be a reasonable company who makes money in legitimate (ethical?) ways: they make great products that people are willing to use, even if they contain ads (its open source so they have to make money some how!). Microsoft has proven themselves time and time again to be a shady and evil company, they try to make money in anyway possible, not that thats a bad thing, but they should do it in more legitimate ways. For example, do you really think windows 7 ultimate is worth $400 while Mac OS X is about $50-100 (dont quote me on that as ive never had a mac) and linux is free? They can all essentially do the same things, sometimes its a little more complex in the later OSes. Do you really think that the Office suite is worth as much as the OS that it runs on? There are other office suites out there that essentially do the same thing and theyre a hell of a lot cheaper, if not free such as Open Office.

tl;dr Essentially what im getting at is Microsoft charges an arm and a leg for buggy products and even if you dont like using their software most of the time you have to and pay extremely high prices to do so. While google is just the opposite, they make great products and usually dont require you to pay out of pocket to use their stuff. Theyre both out to make money, but microsoft doesnt care about their customers.

we wouldn't be where we are today, technologically, without MS.

I hate when people say this, sure they were a major factor in the early pc market, but do you seriously think we would still be stuck at the command line or crappy GUIs without Microsoft? Macintosh would have already existed and would have flourished without MS there to take over the market. A few years later Linus Torvalds would have most likely still have created Linux and it would most likely be an even better OS than it is now since a large amount of people would be using it (compared to the <5% that use it currently). Microsoft has actually stolen (usually non-patented) ideas from other companies, then patented them and touted them as their own creation! Most people use Microsoft products only because they dont know that there are any alternatives, to prove my point go up to 10 random people and ask them if they know of any other OSes besides Windows and Mac, most likely they wont be able to think of any. Microsoft did not further hardware innovation all they furthered was software innovation. They've given us a lot of (dare I say) good products that many people use but if they had never existed someone else would have came up with the same ideas most likely.

Now what Balmer should have said...due to the ads in apps such as google maps, google will be making a ton of money. That is the one thing I do not like about Android. I paid for the phone, it comes with Google Maps and I should not have to view any advertising with somehting paid for

You paid for the device, not the software (in this case you would never have to since its open source). If you dont like the ads in google maps dont use it, get another map app that you have to pay money for and it wont contain ads! Google has to make money some how, yes theyre an awesome company but they dont give away stuff thats completely free. Its either free with ads or paid with no ads. If you had the option to pay an additional $50-100 to get first party android apps without any ads at all would you do it?

Microsofts mobile platforms do suck, but there is no way anyone will beat them in the PC OS market for the next 10 years atleast. I would bet the farm that at least 80% of droidforum users use Windows.

Greetings from one of the other 20%....running Linux on everything

I second that! I only have Windows on my computers for certain things that dont work in Linux or arent available in Linux. For example, most of the tools I use to hack my xbox 360 are only for windows! :icon_ banana:

 

[Darkseider]

Add me to that 20% running nothing but Linux/BSD/Unix and now Android for everything. Never have run Windows personally and never will! Oooh by the way.. PDP-11 FOR LIFE! WOOT! That should date me some.

 

[Pandemic187]

A precedent that would be hard for MS to get around would be if they actually contacted them long time prior to this about them using their product as MS claims. One thing that is bad is that if MS saw them using "their" product and just sat on it, if they immediately contacted all companies involved and said hey either pay us or stop using it, then that is one thing, but if they sat on it and now are saying well we want you to pay us for something you've been using for a year now. The problem with sitting on it is that it shows that they didn't care in the first place about their intellectual rights to the product. Easy to say at that point they are only doing it to try to drop sales of android or every scare a manufacturer into not making a product or holding off on it's release. As seen apple tried many tactics against android for that exact reason.

This, coupled with the fact that WP7 will soon be released shows what MS is really trying to do. Anyone who thinks MS's move is purely about entitlement and compensation really needs to try to look at the context.

 

[captdroid]

A precedent that would be hard for MS to get around would be if they actually contacted them long time prior to this about them using their product as MS claims. One thing that is bad is that if MS saw them using "their" product and just sat on it, if they immediately contacted all companies involved and said hey either pay us or stop using it, then that is one thing, but if they sat on it and now are saying well we want you to pay us for something you've been using for a year now. The problem with sitting on it is that it shows that they didn't care in the first place about their intellectual rights to the product. Easy to say at that point they are only doing it to try to drop sales of android or every scare a manufacturer into not making a product or holding off on it's release. As seen apple tried many tactics against android for that exact reason.

This, coupled with the fact that WP7 will soon be released shows what MS is really trying to do. Anyone who thinks MS's move is purely about entitlement and compensation really needs to try to look at the context.

MS knows they are beat! The only thing MS can do is sue