This headline is misleading and poorly chosen by the original author. Isn't it a convention that headlines that start with an entity followed by a colon, then a statement are meant to convey that the entity is making the statement that follows (e.g. "Microsoft: Windows 7 to Cure Cancer")? In this case, the author is making a statement to MS instead of this being an MS statement.
It's hard to imagine that anything MSFT does with patents is going to damage its reputation any more than the '90s already have. Unisys was hurt because before the GIF debacle, nobody knew who they were, and after it they were a comic book supervillain. Fairly or not, Microsoft is already the Lex Luthor of software.
But it could kill MSFT's attempt to enter this market slice.
Everyone will run from MSFT like vampires from sunlight, and MSFT will never be a significant player in the GPS market.
Perhaps the whole device market!
If a free alternative that won't get you sued is available, would you touch MSFT?
I think the biggest risk for MSFT is purely reputation. Their reputation has got worse and worse and I believe you're right, it's going to start damaging their ability to enter any market other than computers and games consoles (and only there because they actually have a good reputation).
I don't trust MSFT's reliability with products. I've even noticed some classic MSFT flaws in the Xbox 360, namely that it tells you somethings wrong with how you set up the Xbox when it cannot connect to Live, yet if you actually watch the connection steps it connects to the network, connects to the internet and gets 2/3 the way through connecting to MSFT's Live and then it fails, yet they blame you. This reminds me of Live Messenger, when the service goes down for everyone (including articles on ZDNet and places about the outage) you check the service and it always says that the Live systems are running without a problem. I still can't understand why MSFT simply never admits there's a problem; IMO it hurts their reputation a lot more that they don't than if they did.
Honestly, I find myself looking at the apple website, watching the prices of all their products. Because once there's a good enough deal, or I have enough cash to spare (whichever comes first) then I'm getting one. With my wifes' education discount some of the prices are dangerously close to a good deal as it pretty much becomes tax free, in fact I think some save more.
I know for myself that a combination of recent years and getting over my Linux-fanboyness has caused me to move Microsoft from ultimate evil to just annoying big company. This lawsuit severly pushes that back.
It also makes the people who faught against things like the Novell-Microsoft Deal appear correct. This in turn does great damage to the Silverlight and C# OSS efforts. Which in turn does damage to Microsofts ability to say they are cross platform.
What you say is true enough for geeks with an interest in such things, but the wider world has a much shorter memory. A certain type of person, very common unfortunately, feels safe and comforted by the idea of using MS anywhere they possibly can. For them, it's a question of "yes, but what have they done that's bad .. lately?".
This case could supply that. And it's a nice talking point for any debate about OOXML or even mono. Suddenly attacking companies that had foolishly relied on a decade-old Microsoft-supplied "industry standard" certainly makes their new efforts at establishing "standards" easier to undermine. Even the most rabid MS Fanboy will have difficulty claiming, with a straight face, that FAT32 is some kind of proprietary high technology that deserves patent protection.
Plenty of downside for MS on this one. I wonder what the rank and file employees think of it.
I work for an embedded Linux hardware company. We use ext3 on our SD drives and IP over USB to handle writing to it from Mac and Windows, obviously natively from Linux. I'm not sure why TomTom chose FAT. We didn't even have to write our own drivers. Another option is to make the device wifi or Bluetooth so that the filesystem is completely irrelevant to the host.
If you're downloading things from their website anyway, they could include a driver for whatever FS they wanted. They could build on top of FUSE so you wouldn't even need admin rights, probably.
Why not? Packaged as an executable, double click to run? It's not that hard. All those iPod users managed to "install a new filesystem driver" just fine.
Not as convenient as the "just works" FAT on USB, perhaps, but hardly an insurmountable problem. I'm surprised they're not bundling some kind of management program already - asking users to manually arrange files on USB sticks seems a bit fiddly.
I'm not sure how anyone would get around 6,256,642, which is "Method and system for file system management using a flash-erasable, programmable, read-only memory", which honestly just sounds like the idea of a filesystem trivially applied to flash. It may be possible that some other filesystem would not match the description closely enough to be enforceable.
That said, two of the other patents are regarding long filename support in fat32. If the outcome of this is that fat32 is put to rest as the default embedded filesystem, I personally could not be happier about it.
It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft's legal team was not trying to pull crap with Linux, the kernel, and the GPL here. I suspect that they're really going after the Navigation System patents and there's probably a legal reason why they have to prosecute as much of their portfolio as applies. IIRC this prevents the otherwise unprosecuted patents from becoming unenforceable at a later time because they were neglected or not tended.
IANAL, but I think that there is a bit of an exception in the legal doctrine of promissory estoppel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel), which says that one cannot withdraw a promise to another party that they have come to rely upon. If that promise is implied by inaction, it is still sometimes seen as a promise.
One thing that's worth pointing out is that Unisys's shares are trading at 33¢, and its market capitalization is down to US$120M. This share price is about 4% of the heights it reached in 1999, when it started to enforce these patents against GIF. It's low enough that I'm surprised they're still listed on the NYSE.
It wouldn't be surprising if a patent pirate company like Intellectual Ventures or Walker Digital acquired Unisys's patent portfolio, either at bankruptcy auction or by acquiring the company today.
