You may or may not be aware that the vice president and chief legal officer of Google, David Drummond wrote an open letter yesterday basically accusing Apple and Microsoft of conspiring to strangle Android with the acquisition of Noterl and Novell old smartphone related patents, if you aren’t up to scratch on the matter you can read said article (here).
Anyway according to the guys over at Ubergizmo, it appears Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith has also waded into the patent battlefield basically saying that Google isn’t quite telling the truth and omits that they were offered the opportunity to get in on the acquisition of said patents, and used his Twitter account to say…
“Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no.”
Unfortunately the Google guys have not commented on what Smith says, so we aren’t too sure whether Google was asked to make a join bid and refused, but if it is true then the big question is why did Google refuse?
Perhaps they didn’t wish to throw their collective Android lot into bed with the likes of Apple and Microsoft, preferring to remain apart when it comes to gobbling up patents, after all Google has also just purchase 1000 patents from IBM.
Whatever the case, I’m sure this patent thing has done nothing for the mobile space other than set old enemies further apart, and no doubt such arguments will continue for quite some time as most things do when it comes to patents.
Notably, as far as I am aware, Apple has remained silent on this matter, but no doubt given due course they will pipe in giving their view of events as only Apple can.
In the end though with all the wrangling over patent disputes it will be the customer that suffers, with the possible cost of such suits being passed onto the user with more expensive products or held up releases.
Whether you agree with Google or Apple and Microsoft, doesn’t really matter as this is basically about the big boys clashing and wanting to show who’s at the top of the mobile food chain. Personally I think all device makers should have access to all patent use that would surely put a halt to all these shenanigans.
