“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…”