If you can’t beat them, sue them! At least, that seems to be Microsoft’s new mantra (or perhaps it’s not quite new?) when it comes to Android. Microsoft is not suing Motorola for infringing on 9 of their patents, according to them. These patents include the ability to synchronize e-mails, calendars, contacts, schedule meetings, and notifying applications of changing signal strength and battery power.
Since Motorola, which is the only one of the major Android manufacturers that won’t launch a WP7 phone, happens to also be the only one getting sued for these, it makes me wonder: has Microsoft threatened all the other companies into building phones with their OS, if not they would get sued?
Now, all these “patents” seems silly to me, because all of them seem like ideas that are patented to me, not implementations of those ideas. Now, I don’t know how and if Motorola actually stole Microsoft’s technology to use it in Android (doesn’t make sense), but I think Microsoft is just referring to the fact that “if you synchronize e-mails to the phone, then you owe us money”.
How can synchronizing e-mails to the phone be a patent? It’s just an idea of how you can do something It should be the implementation of that idea that gets patented. So what matters is not that you came up with the idea for something, but how exactly you implemented it. Now, unless Motorola actually used Microsoft’s exact technology without asking, then they could be blamed, but if they are simply “synchronizing e-mails to the phone” in a different way than Microsoft, there’s no way Motorola should lose this lawsuit.