MSPatents

Continuing my rant from yesterday...

I can almost hear the conversation between Gates, Ballmer and their newly hired Patent Lawyer:

PL: So guys, what innovations have we got to patent?
Steve: Well, there's was MS-DOS...
Bill: No wait that was just a copy of CP/M and besides we bought it...
Steve: A graphical user interface?...
Bill: No, no we copied that from Apple... hmmm
Steve: Well there's always Bill's BASIC language interpreter, I know he wrote that...
Bill: Yeah! We took a great simple learning language and made it practically incomprehensible, er, I mean we extended it with new and useful features!
Steve: Let's see, how about one of those object oriented hacks we crammed in?
Bill: The IS operator?
Steve: No, there's almost definitely prior art on that one.
Bill: How about IS NOT?
Steve: Cool! We're in!
PL: All that money, all that time... this is the best you can come up with?