Meanwhile Microsoft have ben quietly aquiring companies products and more importantly patents...
One of these days MS is going to wheel out the IP/code/patents they own that other companies have been using in thier own products and then the fun starts
MS may not be perfect by any stretch of the imagination (like any large or successfull business) but far too many companies/individuals these days see vague patents and speculative sueing of MS as a business plan and get rich quick scheme.
The Eolas case recently was a good example, the claim against MS was that IE broke patents by allowing the automatic use of plugins (not just activex) in a browser (i'm sure NathanE can explain it better than I can). Despite almost the entire industry (including Tim Berners Lee) rallying to put forward the claim was "a bad thing" it was upheld and MS got hit with hundreds of millions of dollars of fine, far in excess of anything the individual concerened had ever done to "earn" the money. So far the other browser companies escape because they aren't seen as having enough cash if the judgement goes against them for it to be worth it.
So, come up with a vague patent about, oh I dunno, use of high definition images and their integration into something or other (a "information browser?!") and sit on it quietly. Wait till a big company or the community in general uses something that loosly matches that description and sue the buggers without actually having to take the trouble to research, fund and launch a company or product to do it yourself...
The problem is the larger community very rarely looks beyond the shock horror headlines (if it's in "the register it must be true ) and so MS get tarred with the "evil empires at it again" brush. It goes with the territory I suppose... /shrug
I'm off to come up with some wacky theories for patents as a pension fund this afternoon now