[jcranmer]

For a large company, filing a patent is probably a sign that some team internally has looked at implementing it. I'd expect that there is some sort of internal budget dedicated towards filing patents, and an internal team in charge of deciding which internal patent applications are worth actually pursuing.

While ideally you'd want to focus on patents for things you're actively pursuing, if there's budget for more patents and the latest set of applications are weak, then the team could end up pursuing applications that the development team has no intention of pursuing further.

In that vein, I'd suggest that "wants to" is a stronger description of intent than actually happens with corporate patent filings.

[crooked-v]

And one can't forget defensive patent filing, where companies will file patents on anything and every idea they can come up with even tangentially related to what management actually wants, as a way of preventing somebody else from doing the same and then suing them over any overlapping elements.