The Blackboard Patent: Where's Waldo?

The Blackboard Patent: Where's Waldo?

Posted Sep 7, 2006 15:56 UTC (Thu) by mcopple (subscriber, #2920)
Parent article: The Blackboard Patent: Where's Waldo?

My reaction to this article is disbelief. Microsoft's motives are crystal clear, even after the author did her best to take the quotes completely out of context -- to encourage the use of the .NET framework. Put Blackboard on .NET, give Blackboard the knowledge and encouragement to add features to it, and next thing you know, customers are going to their local Microsoft reseller to find a copy of Windows Server to put it on. That's not conspiracy, that's old-fashioned business sense.

As for the patent trolling, that too has a simple enough answer -- one that does not require a dark conspiracy by Darth Ballmer. Patent trolling is popular right now, and it works. Witness the world of hurt RIM end up in, despite the fact that the patents they supposedly infringed upon were being invalidated as the judgement came out. All you need is a clever lawyer and a pile of cash, and suddenly, your underfunded competitors are dead in the water. The only reason SCO did not succeed is that it happened to choose a victim (IBM) with more lawyers, more cash, and the market share to ride out the storm while SCO sputtered out.

Blackboard isn't a pawn in some massive Microsoft conspiracy -- it is a market opportunist that sees a chance to make its market dominance permanent by knocking its competition out for good. Admittedly, it is a smarmy practice that consumers and customers are right to condemn; but it is a standard tool in today's business hard-ball playbook.

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