[spankalee]

This should be the top comment.

If Google wants to patents to be part of a defensive portfolio to protect against lawsuits from Microsoft, then it does them no good to own the patents jointly with Microsoft.

The only good owning the patents jointly would do is take those patents out of play in lawsuits between the two, but that's not enough when you're already being attacked with other patents.

This should be abundantly clear, but apparently isn't.