Google Accuses Microsoft of Resorting to Patents When "Products Stop Succeeding"

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Microsoft is using patents as a crutch when its technologies fail in the market. This is what a Google patent lawyer has implied, pointing out how Microsoft is almost bleeding Android smartphone manufacturers hundreds of millions each year from licensing royalties.

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Google counsel Tim Porter criticizes Microsoft’s attacks on Linux, particularly by putting the squeeze on Microsoft corporate customers who deploy a mixed Linux and Windows environment. Google thinks that Microsoft is heavily resorting on patents when its products become irrelevant in the market, pointing to how the company lost the smartphone dominance previously held by Windows Mobile, and how Microsoft has been late in the game with its Windows Phone platform.

When their products stop succeeding in the marketplace, when they get marginalized, as is happening now with Android, they use the large patent portfolio they’ve built up to get revenue from the success of other companies’ products.

Google says that the current patent system is broken, referring to how software technologies can be patented. Instead, Porter says there are arguments that copyright protection is “more appropriate” for the software industry. It’s interesting to note that Google is in the same position as Microsoft was in the early 1990′s. Back then, Microsoft founder Bill Gates wrote that “the industry would be at a complete standstill” if software were eligible for patent protection. He said that “some big company will patent some obvious thing [and] take as much of our profits as they want.”

This is exactly what Microsoft is now doing, by enforcing its technology patents on Android smartphone manufacturers. Microsoft is reportedly able to earn as much as $5 per handset, which translates to more than $400 million per year in licensing deals from about 50% of all Android phone makers. Microsoft has said this was only fair, since they own certain technologies used in Android and that Google should stop whining about having to pay royalties.

Has Microsoft lost its edge? It has already made some major missteps in the mobile industry, such as by cancelling its Courier tablet platform prematurely, even as Apple was just launching the first iPad in 2010. Nokia’s Lumia 800 and 710 Windows Phones are about to be released later this month, but amid soaring sales of the Apple iPhone, and Android’s smartphone market growing, is an “Android tax” all that Microsoft has to resort to in order to survive and remain relevant?