I recently posted on Massachusetts's declaration to move to open document formats for government documents. Matt Asay raises several issues (innovation and customers, my possible confusion of patents and innovation, me being anti-Microsoft). One I've corrected inline, by bringing it here because he was correct that it really didn't fit the other post. The other two I've brought here to hopefully clarify.
Matt calls me out on the fact that I said:
Customers don't buy innovation. (And customers couldn't care less
about nor do they buy patents.) They buy solutions to problems.
He says (by calling out Jason Matusow's discussion on his blog):
... That Microsoft is an innovator (sometimes measured in patents and
copyright), and customers should buy from it because it will
consistently deliver cool, useful (i.e., innovative) new things worth
buying.
Here's where I realize Matt and I are likely agreeing, but confused in each other's terminology. He is equating innovative with useful. I absolutely think consumers buy things because they're cool and useful. That's the demand side act. Innovation (to me) is the act of design and creation. The dictionary defines it as a noun meaning "the act of introducing something new", or "something newly introduced." It's a supply side act. And it is different from the buyer's motivation.
As Matt later points out in a subsequent post:
It's not that we wake up one morning and say, "My, I sure need some
innovation today! Where can I buy some?" Rather, we buy products that
catch our eye, that deliver results, that give us a performance or
feature edge. All of this stems from innovation.
Exactly so.
But I am not confusing innovation and patents. (I think he's merely goading me in that statement to produce the following bit). Intellectual property (IP) is a collection of legal tools used to protect assets (i.e. innovation), consisting of copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret law. You need to create first (i.e. innovate in Matt's terms) before you patent.
Patents are government-granted time-limited mini-monopolies to enable the creator to bring their work to market protected in such a way that they recover their investment costs, but published in such a way that others will be able to build eventually upon the work. But patents cost money to obtain and defend and maintain. They are merely tickets to a negotiation as I've observed. Useful? Depends. Patenting is merely one choice in relation to how you use the asset created.
From a business perspective, I would rather have a growing bed of customers, and out run and out deliver the competition, possibly even publishing like crazy to prevent those competitors from patenting in the space. Takes less time. Costs less money. And if I'm a small company, having a little stack of a few patents, even brilliant essential patents, won't help me going up against a cross-license negotiation with any of the big guns (IBM, Microsoft, Intel, etc.). In software, the speed and cost of delivery of innovation makes patenting a possibly suboptimal use of my time and money. Indeed, I could do everything "right", researching patents, possibly applying for my own, and with the 18-24 month gap between application and award for a patent, still discover I'm infringing months after I've shipped my product to market. I'm not the only one thinking this way. Here's what Joi Ito had to say recently.
Lastly, I'm not an ardent anti-Microsoft crusader. (Yes, I was on an airplane at the time he wrote that bit.) I spent the first decade of my career from '80 through '91 on the customer side of the fence in large IT organizations in retail and manufacturing. I have always been unsympathetic towards any vendor that forgets that it's the customer's money, and they have to earn it. The vendor has to care about helping me solve my problem. Vendors aren't universally "good" or "bad" at this. Microsoft ends up in my sights a little frequently only because of a certain depth of experience inside the walls.
Pax.
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