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Microsoft Sues Salesforce for ‘Patent Infringement’

I know that patents are there to incentivize innovation but there are instances where things just get silly.

The lawsuit that Microsoft is slamming on Salesforce is one of these instances.  Microsoft is suing for not 1, but 9 infringements, which is sure to ruffle a lot of feathers at Salesforce.

Here is an example of one of these patents:

System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu

If you follow the link and read through all the jargon, you’ll eventually come to find that its basically a patent on having a drop down menu on site that lists additional links.  How many sites and services currently have something like that?  At least a couple of million, I’m willing to wager.

If you ask me, these patents are so generic that they allow the big players to bully their competitors into submission.  And that’s a hindrance to innovation, not a driver.  The laws need to be updated, but that will probably take at least the better half of a decade.  Now Salesforce is by no means a tiny company, but simply imagine if Microsoft were to pull this shit on a startup SaaS company with some truly innovative features or additions.  The poor little guy would have no other option than to throw in the towel.

Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy-general counsel for Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft had this to say:

“We have a responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard that investment, and therefore cannot stand idly by when others infringe our IP rights.”

Really? You have a responsibility to make sure nobody else in the world has drop down menus that display links?  Or is it really just a ploy to weaken Salesforce, a company that is clearly beating you in CRM. It’s a shame that our current system even allows this type of corporate greed.

“I spent 25$ on an Digital Sparkly Horse”

That’s what a lot of people are saying. At least, people in the World of Warcraft. The most widely played massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) recently released the ‘Celestial Steed’, an in-game mount. Think of it as another means of transportation for players in the game (it certainly isn’t the only one as there are already hundreds of free mounts available in the game). The price tag on this piece of code was a whopping $25, more than the cost of the actual game.

Now, you might say, “Who in their right mind would spend almost 30 bucks on a purely cosmetic item in a video game?” Well, as it turns out, a lot of people. Blizzard entertainment, the owner of the Warcraft franchise, sold this digital product through an online store where customers reported queues of around 200,000. It is estimated that this mount sold in the hundreds of thousands, netting the company millions in the first day.

To give you an idea of how easily this money was made, I’ll break down the actual digital code itself. You see, the ‘Celestial Steed’ is a reskin of another mount that is already available in the game. So all a programmer had to do was change the look. I’d estimate that this probably took about a day’s worth of work (I’m pulling this number of out thin air).

World of Warcraft’s subscription base has leveled off as of late, so it makes sense that the company would devise new ways to add additional revenue streams. However, the latest explosive success of the ‘Celestial Steed’ begs the question: What else are people willing to pay for?

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