Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Microsoft Going Crazy … AGAIN

Microsoft is now suing Barnes & Noble for patent infringement. Microsoft says in it’s press release:

The patents at issue cover a range of functionality embodied in Android devices that are essential to the user experience, including: natural ways of interacting with devices by tabbing through various screens to find the information they need; surfing the Web more quickly, and interacting with documents and e-books.

Horacio E. Gutierrez (Corporate Vice President) further elaborates on the issue in his blog post:

  • Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;
  • Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;
  • Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;
  • Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and
  • Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.

WTF! Are you serious?! Microsoft has a problem with someone (without a license from Microsoft) offering easy navigation and ability to select & annotate text?!

I have to agree with MG Siegler from TechCrunch“Next up, Microsoft is going to sue over the ability to type, look, and maybe even breathe. I’m sure they patented those things at some point over the past 30 years. They have something ridiculous like 20,000 patents”.

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