"As readers of my Centrify blog know, I usually use this blog as a forum to discuss Centrify's vision, customers, why our technology and our approach to interoperability makes sense, etc. In today's blog I am going to go 'off topic' and discuss interoperability as it relates to Microsoft's recent announcements re: their 'interoperability principals' and analyze how recently published Microsoft protocols map to US patents and US patent applications that are held by Microsoft. You may (or may not) be surprised with some of my analysis at the end of this blog post regarding the percentage of the protocols that are actually covered by US patents and the total number of US patents that are in Windows operating system (client and server) that I was able to deduce based on information published by Microsoft.
"The motivation for this blog entry is that given that so much has been written about Microsoft and patents vis a vis Linux and vis a vis the European Commission decision, I found it interesting that it seems no one in the industry has actually rolled up their sleeves and analyzed and published how many patents Microsoft actually holds within their Windows server protocols and what functional areas these patents cover..."
