{"id":89,"date":"2013-11-01T23:41:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-01T23:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/?p=89"},"modified":"2020-08-07T03:20:39","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T03:20:39","slug":"nook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/2013\/11\/01\/nook\/","title":{"rendered":"Thermonuclear War"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the early days of the iOS-Android war, Steve Jobs\u00a0told his biographer Walter Isaacson<\/a>\u00a0\u201cI\u2019m going to destroy Android, because it\u2019s a stolen product. I\u2019m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.\u201d\u00a0Everyone immediately anticipated patent claims against the Android OS. I doubt many anticipated claims against Google\u2019s undiversified core business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ArsTechnica is reporting<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0Rockstar<\/a>,\u00a0the company spawned from an\u00a0Apple-Microsoft-RIM-Sony\u00a0alliance which, in 2011, outbid Google for a trove of Nortel and Novell patents, has filed suit against Google:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\u00a0complaint<\/a>\u00a0against Google involves six patents, all from the same patent \u201cfamily.\u201d They\u2019re all titled \u201cassociative search engine,\u201d and list Richard Skillen and Prescott Livermore as inventors. The patents describe \u201can advertisment machine which provides advertisements to a user searching for desired information within a data network.\u201d<\/p>

The oldest patent in the case is US Patent No.\u00a06,098,065<\/a>, with a filing date of 1997, one year before Google was founded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

If you think that sounds like\u00a0nearly 95% of Google\u2019s revenue<\/a>, you\u2019re not alone.\u00a0This sole patent feels like enough motivation for Google to have won this auction at all costs. Not only did Google not win,\u00a0it mad<\/a>e joke bids. What were they thinking?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps Google wasn\u2019t thinking. Perhaps it was woefully unprepared for the 2011 auction and lacked a sufficiently clear picture of how valuable the portfolio was  \u2014 and conversely, how dangerous it would be in other hands. Or perhaps Google decided to brave court battles and ideally set a precedent that crumbles the patent troll house of cards for good. That sounds very, very risky, and doesn\u2019t explain why it bid up to $4.4B in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also doesn\u2019t explain why Google paid twelve billion dollars (!!!) for Motorola just one month later. It\u2019s harder than ever to see the Motorola purchase as anything but panic: having lost the Nortel auction, possibly not even realizing what they\u2019d lost until after the fact, Google scrambled for countermeasures. Larry Page practically admitted as much\u00a0when he announc<\/a>e<\/a>d the deal<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, Motorola\u2019s patents have not proven too useful.\u00a0Florian Mueller<\/a>\u00a0repeatedly predicted this mess, chronicling a number of courtroom dead-ends since the Motorola deal was made. And then there\u2019s the small matter of Motorola\u00a0continuing to hemorrhage cash<\/a>. I wonder if\u00a0Dan Lyons still thinks the deal was a \u201crope-a-dope\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve said this\u00a0multiple<\/a>\u00a0times<\/a>\u00a0in the past<\/a>, and I\u2019ll say it again: I don\u2019t like this game. Rockstar\u00a0looks<\/a>, smells, and now acts like countless NPE\u2019s that have done more harm than good \u2014 namely\u00a0Lodsys<\/a>,\u00a0which\u00a0has been aggressively harassing Apple\u2019s own ecosystem. It\u2019s extremely disappointing to see Apple facilitate this kind of behavior.\u00a0At the same time, the missed Nortel auction and dubious Motorola purchase look as awful a strategic blunder as ever for Google. They kept their head in the sand for too long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the early days of the iOS-Android war, Steve Jobs\u00a0told his biographer Walter Isaacson\u00a0\u201cI\u2019m going to destroy Android, because it\u2019s a stolen product. I\u2019m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.\u201d\u00a0Everyone immediately anticipated patent claims against the Android OS. I doubt many anticipated claims against Google\u2019s undiversified core business. ArsTechnica is reporting\u00a0that\u00a0Rockstar,\u00a0the company spawned from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}