Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 28th Nov 2006 12:47 UTC, submitted by Governa
"I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006.The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week."
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Member since:
2005-11-13
It's a part of the broken US patent system. Get some patents and use them as protection against the other guys who use patents as protection against the other guys who use patents as protection against .... you get the picture, right?
I have to agree with you here, as someone who lives in the US and worked at a company that owned several technology patents the system is broken.
It used to be that you received a patent to protect the design of a piece of machinery or manufacturing process that you produced. Patents were to protect the designs of your products. Patents addressed real needs of the industrial revolution.
These days people are getting patents for nothing other than ideas, there are no products that they produce. They simply try to make a business out of the 'ideas'. I don't think the system was designed with this in mind. Some people may think this is just the evolution of patents but I think its lead to a situation where you can come up with a unique idea in a product and get sued by someone who simply described something similiar on paper.
In the end you produced the work and final product and some leech who spent far less of an investment and never produced a product can take you for big bucks.
My only hope is that the people of the US will recognize this at some point and set it straight. If something is not done the US runs the risk of losing big in the technology sector (if it hasn't already begun).