What Paul Allen and Larry Ellison Have in Common

"The trouble with that line of attack, of course, is that it's complete nonsense. Interval Research was not an "an early, ground-breaking contributor to the development of the internet economy": I was there, and they had zero impact whatsoever, as far as I can recall. Allen may indeed have invested money in an attempt to "innovate" in this area, but the patents cited in the action are certainly anything but that, since they are all trivially obvious and seem vulnerable to piles of prior art (I certainly have plenty of relevant screen shots in my ancient 1995 book "The Internet with Windows", which precedes them.)

"But you don't have to take my word for it that Allen's Interval contributed nothing to the Internet economy back then. The indefatigable PJ has put together another splendid Groklaw post (including the full text of the complaint), which has a short except from an interview from 2002, with Terry Winograd, who worked at Interval Research, in which he admits:

"Interval got completely sideswiped by the Web. It was started just before the Web. In fact, my first exposure to Mosaic was through a summer intern at Interval. All of a sudden all of the money and talent and everything else got sucked into the Web."

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