Microsoft To Charge Phone Makers a Licensing Fee 225
angry tapir writes "Microsoft may be one of the only remaining mobile operating-system providers that charges handset makers a licensing fee, but in exchange vendors get at least one important benefit: protection from intellectual property worries. 'Microsoft indemnifies its Windows Phone 7 licensees against patent infringement claims,' the company said. 'We stand behind our product, and step up to our responsibility to clear the necessary IP rights.'"
In related news, Windows Phone 7 will be exclusive to AT&T at launch, and it seems Microsoft is counting on Xbox Live integration to be the "hook" that gets people interested in the new devices.
This is nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft has never not charged a license fee. It's pretty steep too.
But they keep pushing this indemnification clause as if it provides some kind of true advantage. It does not. First, it only covers the technology in the OS which MS would necessarily have to protect itself from anyway. Second, if a handset maker were to get sued and lose, they would in turn sue MS for damages. And finally, no one has successfully sued a handset maker for infringed patents in operating systems like Linux.
What this tells me is that they haven't changed their selling strategy one bit, and they haven't got the slightest idea how to change it. Whoever is in charge of their mobile division needs to be replaced. They have a technology that is late to the game and a selling strategy that is worthless to anyone with any experience with other operating systems.
Re:You get what you pay for. (Score:2, Interesting)
bwahahahaha what a troll. What a deliberate, obvious troll. You should have used republican talking points.
SCO/Darl Mcbride never won any case. Nobody has settled with SCO either, in fact SCO is in bankruptcy. Why again? Because of all that stuff they "owned"? Is that where the "people will settle" BS comes from? Because patent trolls rarely win, as recent studies have shown. [techdirt.com] So there is a reason to not settle: you can save more money by going through the courts, because the more you cost the competitor (microsoft), the less they're going to be willing to go after you again.
Have a patent of theirs invalidated and they can't go after anyone else for it either. expose the company as a subsidiary of microsoft. Either of these are retaliatory options.
So lets get to #2, the only reason anyone has any issues of "idenmnity" is because Microsoft is suing their competitors through subsidiaries. However, there is still a second important factor: do you have to pay anything to create your own implementation of android? No. Do you have to pay for indemnification? no.
what you're stating is almost along the same lines as trying to claim x264 is free, which might be true if people didn't look for more information.
Re:This is nothing new (Score:3, Interesting)
MS is trying to go after their true competitor in the space which is Android. While everyone talks about Apple being their biggest threat, it's really Android because Microsoft's partners and former partners might choose a free and configurable OS over their licensed and increasingly restrictive one. Also considering how MS has screwed over their partners in recent years, some of them might be wary to stay in a partnership with MS. If more and more partners abandon the Windows Mobile framework, there isn't a lot that MS can do except develop their own hardware. Considering their recent history with hardware design, that can't look good. The only success in MS recent history (Xbox, Zune, Kin) has been Xbox but also at the same time it has been unprofitable.
Re:On the desktop, perhaps (Score:3, Interesting)
I partly agree. I have an HD2, which uses WinMob 6.5. It's by no means perfect, but way more open than anything Apple (imagine ! drag-and-drop music/movies upload from any PC ! No need to use one specific media player/manager !), is reasonably stable and has the handful of apps I need (browser, media, ereader, RSS).
Winphone7 actually looks worse than 6.5, with Jobsian levels of user lockout and playpenning, and certainly Microsoftian levels of ergonomy and reliability. Talk about best of both worlds...
My bet is MS is once again shooting themselves in the foot by aping Apple instead of going after another market, namely users who actually want a hint of freedom, even at the cost of a smidgen of complexity.
Re:Coincidentally, MS launches attack on Android.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:You get what you pay for. (Score:3, Interesting)
You misread. Red Hat is a business built around giving the Microsoft-like treatment to Linux. They'll train, support, and give you somebody to complain to when it's not working.
Re:On the desktop, perhaps (Score:1, Interesting)
You could start with not being able to apply patches without taking it down.
The obvious follow up is the need for most of them to be rebooted at least weekly or more often if there is a lot of change to DS. We won't even talk about exchange.
There is also the complete nightmare of DS and replication, who builds a server OS where the default is that any machine can become the master?
Now for the obligatory get off my lawn story,
I have a novell server and shadow at a client site that I built in 1994 that is still supporting a single mission critical legacy application with no maintenance other than hot-swapping out the drives a few times, (mirrored, replace one re-mirror it then when that's done replace and re-mirror the other) The only time the shadow server has ever been activated is when testing the failover plan, which it does flawlessly, the users never even know and it text messages all the admins and myself both when it promotes and demotes, ya it does all that by itself, data sync included.
According to my logs the last time it was rebooted was in 2005 due to a power failure that lasted longer than the UPS. The system shut itself down gracefully and restarted without intervention when power was restored.
The windows servers next to it needed all of directory services rebuilt and the corrected copy manually propagated because a corrupted copy became the master copy.
I know that most of you grew up with MS servers and yes, 2008 IS better than it's previous versions.
HOWEVER just because the shit is now wrapped in a crispy deep fried egg-roll skin, that dosen't make it better than a real egg-roll.