It’s becoming more and more clear that Microsoft’s patents are mostly worthless. And these are the patents Microsoft is trying to coerce Android manufacturers into paying them license fees that are almost as expensive as their whole WP7 OS. Talk about the nerve on Microsoft!
Motorola has just managed to get 6 out of 7 of Microsoft’s patents invalidated. This is a big deal because I’m sure Microsoft used some of their best patents in their lawsuit (it doesn’t make sense to use your weakest patents in the lawsuit). So if so many of them are found invalid in Court, that means that Microsoft is cheating on the other Android manufacturers, too, when they are asking for so much money for their patents, seeing how the vast majority of them can be invalidated.
The other manufacturers should man up and sue Microsoft, or just break their contract, and see if Microsoft wants to sue them. If they do, there’s a high possibility that they’ll lose most of their patents in the lawsuit, too. And even if they win with a few of them, it still means the manufacturer can get away with paying a lot less for their licensing extortion program than they do now.
But if they do win, it means they can break free from the licensing deal, and have a competitive advantage over the other Android manufacturers who haven’t fought Microsoft in Court. $10-$15 in licensing fees, means at least $30 off the retail product. That’s pretty significant in the increasingly more competitive Android market, where specs are evaluated head-on.
For some manufacturers $30 could be their whole profit on the phone. So this could be a game-changer for any manufacturer who decided to test Microsoft’s patents in Court, or at the very least tell them they will stop paying for them, and see what Microsoft will do. If more manufacturers would do this in the same time, it would even freak out Microsoft because they would have to sue all of them in the same time, and lose focus of their business. It could end up very distracting for them, especially as they risk losing the Windows monopoly with Windows 8, and they need to stay focus on getting that right.