[geofft]

The company exists to sell a product or provide a service, not to own intellectual property. Sometimes the most effective means is to own the IP, but it's a means, not an end. Very few companies tend to market IP directly.

For instance, in a sufficiently broad view, 99% of AWS is other people's IP - the PC platform, hardware virtualization, Xen, Linux and userspace tools, Perl, etc. etc. And they seem to be doing a fine job commercializing it. They could build their own computing architecture, write their own hypervisor, design their own OS, etc., but that would probably be a less profitable approach. There's an existence proof in Microsoft's Azure and IBM's z/whatever-they're-calling-it-these-days, which are significantly less popular.