| Yodon, The difference is Google gets the patents so nobody else can and does NOT use as a weapon or for royalities. Microsoft just takes a different approach. They use the patents for royalities and how they make over a billion off of Android phones a year. Google has tons of patents and even buys them up like what they did with Moto. Yet they do not charge royalities for using. They instead use for cross license agreements. Just a very different culture from Microsoft. But one of my favorite examples of Google and patents is VP8. We had Mpeg-LA extorting license fees out of us for Mpeg2. Google said enough and created VP8 and gave away for free for anyone to use. But then in addition also offered patent infringement protection for anyone using VP8. That is just not an approach you would see from Microsoft. "It doesn’t matter that’s not the company they are anymore " What has changed? I would say they are giving back more now than ever before. They use to give their "secrets" in papers like Map/Reduce, GFS, and so many others. But now they actually give the software away with their "secrets". Perfect example is Kubernettes. They build Borg and learned from it and then with everything they learned now give away K8s. Which is now used by Microsoft, Amazon and pretty much the entire industry. They do not charge a cent and help their competitors better compete against them. They did it because it helps the entire industry move forward. That is just not the culture at Microsoft. Google continues to give away just tons and tons of IP. But you do have me curious. How do you think they have changed in terms of the technology community? BTW, another example is giving away SPDY which became http2 which helped everyone including competitors. Or all the money they spend finding all the major security flaws including Shellshock Meltdown, Cloudbleed, HeartBleed, Spectre and many others. Cloudbleed was with a competitor and helped them solve the issue. Google finds many Microsoft vulnerabilities and tells them about them helping them make their products more secure. |