Patently Obvious
The Patent Portfolio is held in awe by the telecom world. When a telecom junkie says "mine is bigger than yours", he is typically refering to his list of patents. OK, not usually, but often enough to be disturbing.
Parakeet Poop
For those of you who did not pay attention in your civics class and/or are suffering from a debilitating mind disease that enables you to read postings on the computer but otherwise not function as a literate member of society, patents are granted by the government to say that you've done something unique and anyone else who does it has to pay you for the privilege. For example, the lightbulb was patented by it's inventor (General [H. J.] Electric), who needed a way to iluminate late-night baseball games. Also patented was the parakeet diaper - by someone else - for a reaon that no one truly understands.
The number of patents that a company is able to acquire can determine its worth in the beady little eyes of investors and/or venture capitalists. Smaller, private companies especially pursue patent portfolios to prive their worth to their overlords. The net result is approximately 10,251 companies each with a patent portfolio of a dozen or more patents granted by the US government. So you can probably guess where most of these patents fall on the lightbulb to parakeet diaper continuum.
Our personal favorite patent granted to a telcom company during the tech boom was a patent on a cup holder on the door of the equipment. Yep, while most of us were pursuing patents with names like "The Use of Phosphoglobulins in Fiber Splicing", there was someone out there who actually spent the big bucks to patent a device that enabled a technician to put his morning pick-me-up down without having to - oh, I don't know - put it on a table or something. Pure parakeet poop, no?
Telecomm Poop
Having had the good fortune to receive paychecks from a multitude of companies over the last decade or so, the enormous staff here at Telecommedy headquarters have been party to numerous patent submissions. No matter how much parakeep poop they hold, those with their names on the patents will have them bronzed and hung in their offices. It can indeed be impressive to walk into the office of a CTO and see a wall covered with bronzed patents. Impressive enough to suck money directly from the bank accounts of non-technical investors (usually a redundancy).
Even the big telecomm companies are not immune. However, with their much larger staffs, they are spared the ignominity of actually talking about the details of their patent portfolios. They can just come out with the numbers. For example, one very large dinosaur left over from the days when Collosus strode over the telecom Rhodes quite often published the number of patents granted to their staff while their stock and number of employees enjoyed a faster plunge than Jean-Claude Killy (or the Lipton Iced-Tea girl, for those of you searching for a less obscure reference).
Government Parakeets at Work
All of the patent nonsense is controlled by the Patent Office in the Federal Mental Asylum known as Washington, D.C. (Don't Call). The underpaid, understaffed, and WAY under-informed staff of the Patent Office is understandably eager to get those patent applications out of the way so that they can eventually manage to burrow their way through the stacks of paper and back into the sunlight. Many Patent Office workers have not seen sunlight since the Carter administration and have turned the lovely shade of wallpaper paste. So, one must understand if occasionally a parakeet diaper makes it through.
However, it is more difficult to understand patents granted for "inventions" so obvious that the applicants should be fined for conspicuous audacity. For example, there have been patents granted for "a way of making a swing go from side to side by alternate pulling on ropes" - a maneuver that has been practiced by kids since the Earl of Swing first invented the "Swing-Set" in 1604. One large British company even tried to patent the hyperlink - that underlined blue text on web pages that you click on to access another web page or photograph of Brittany Spears's navel or something.
There have been equally obvious patents in Telecomm, but they would only be obvious to those of us who live in the industry. Things like patents on passing through some wavelengths while dropping other wavelengths in the same device. Trust me - that one's obvious. The point is that the Patent Office is so overwhelmed that really silly things are getting through. In fact, Mrs. Elizabeth Hornwinkel from Ottumwa, Iowa recently received a patent on the 1040-EZ form after a mix-up over addresses with her husband (inventor of the Wash-o-Matic automaic cat bathing device), who sent her income tax form to the wrong governmental agency. The IRS is, of course, fighting the patent. In the meantime, Mrs. Hornwinkel has collected over $4.3 million in patent licensing fees.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, and after much thought on the matter, it occurs to us now that the Lipton Iced-Tea plunge may also be too obscure for the younger audience. For those of you in that group, I offer the following substitue analogy: a faster plunge than Brittany Spear's moral standing after Justin revealed that she was - in fact - not quite a pure as originally marketed.
You are welcome.
Parakeet Poop
For those of you who did not pay attention in your civics class and/or are suffering from a debilitating mind disease that enables you to read postings on the computer but otherwise not function as a literate member of society, patents are granted by the government to say that you've done something unique and anyone else who does it has to pay you for the privilege. For example, the lightbulb was patented by it's inventor (General [H. J.] Electric), who needed a way to iluminate late-night baseball games. Also patented was the parakeet diaper - by someone else - for a reaon that no one truly understands.
The number of patents that a company is able to acquire can determine its worth in the beady little eyes of investors and/or venture capitalists. Smaller, private companies especially pursue patent portfolios to prive their worth to their overlords. The net result is approximately 10,251 companies each with a patent portfolio of a dozen or more patents granted by the US government. So you can probably guess where most of these patents fall on the lightbulb to parakeet diaper continuum.
Our personal favorite patent granted to a telcom company during the tech boom was a patent on a cup holder on the door of the equipment. Yep, while most of us were pursuing patents with names like "The Use of Phosphoglobulins in Fiber Splicing", there was someone out there who actually spent the big bucks to patent a device that enabled a technician to put his morning pick-me-up down without having to - oh, I don't know - put it on a table or something. Pure parakeet poop, no?
Telecomm Poop
Having had the good fortune to receive paychecks from a multitude of companies over the last decade or so, the enormous staff here at Telecommedy headquarters have been party to numerous patent submissions. No matter how much parakeep poop they hold, those with their names on the patents will have them bronzed and hung in their offices. It can indeed be impressive to walk into the office of a CTO and see a wall covered with bronzed patents. Impressive enough to suck money directly from the bank accounts of non-technical investors (usually a redundancy).
Even the big telecomm companies are not immune. However, with their much larger staffs, they are spared the ignominity of actually talking about the details of their patent portfolios. They can just come out with the numbers. For example, one very large dinosaur left over from the days when Collosus strode over the telecom Rhodes quite often published the number of patents granted to their staff while their stock and number of employees enjoyed a faster plunge than Jean-Claude Killy (or the Lipton Iced-Tea girl, for those of you searching for a less obscure reference).
Government Parakeets at Work
All of the patent nonsense is controlled by the Patent Office in the Federal Mental Asylum known as Washington, D.C. (Don't Call). The underpaid, understaffed, and WAY under-informed staff of the Patent Office is understandably eager to get those patent applications out of the way so that they can eventually manage to burrow their way through the stacks of paper and back into the sunlight. Many Patent Office workers have not seen sunlight since the Carter administration and have turned the lovely shade of wallpaper paste. So, one must understand if occasionally a parakeet diaper makes it through.
However, it is more difficult to understand patents granted for "inventions" so obvious that the applicants should be fined for conspicuous audacity. For example, there have been patents granted for "a way of making a swing go from side to side by alternate pulling on ropes" - a maneuver that has been practiced by kids since the Earl of Swing first invented the "Swing-Set" in 1604. One large British company even tried to patent the hyperlink - that underlined blue text on web pages that you click on to access another web page or photograph of Brittany Spears's navel or something.
There have been equally obvious patents in Telecomm, but they would only be obvious to those of us who live in the industry. Things like patents on passing through some wavelengths while dropping other wavelengths in the same device. Trust me - that one's obvious. The point is that the Patent Office is so overwhelmed that really silly things are getting through. In fact, Mrs. Elizabeth Hornwinkel from Ottumwa, Iowa recently received a patent on the 1040-EZ form after a mix-up over addresses with her husband (inventor of the Wash-o-Matic automaic cat bathing device), who sent her income tax form to the wrong governmental agency. The IRS is, of course, fighting the patent. In the meantime, Mrs. Hornwinkel has collected over $4.3 million in patent licensing fees.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, and after much thought on the matter, it occurs to us now that the Lipton Iced-Tea plunge may also be too obscure for the younger audience. For those of you in that group, I offer the following substitue analogy: a faster plunge than Brittany Spear's moral standing after Justin revealed that she was - in fact - not quite a pure as originally marketed.
You are welcome.
posted by Scott | 4:50 PM
2 Comments:
I have seen many comments like this from the software community. However I learned another lesson from the bubble. This lesson is that writing software is not very difficult. Even with that, most software writers are not very good. So the inflated salaries that they earned in the bubble were never sustainable. The mass layoffs and the outsourcing to job shops were the predictable result of too much money being paid to people who were doing things that can be learned in only a few weeks by not particularly bright people.
Another manifestaion of this is the disdain felt for people involved in finding new ways to do things. Since the memebers of thundering herd of software 'designers' (i.e. code bashers) have learned to do the same simple thing over and over again, they are befuddled when someone steps back to say that things could be done differently. They claim that all technology problems have been solved by UNIX, or SmallTalk (smalltalkers are convinced that they know the truth and are smarter than the rest of the world), JAVA or anyone of a thousand other technologies. When someone points out that this is not so we get the claims that the patent office is staffed by dummies, that inventors are charlatans or worse, that company patents are obvious etc.
What really is obvious is that the state of the software industry is dreadful. Most software is badly designed. The poor quality of software design is exceeded by the even worse quality of the implementation.
The recent Mars robots were sent to Mars with an operating system that contained a memory leak. Not only did the software 'designers' not know that the OS they used had a memory leak, they never performed the tests that would have detected a memory leak. Beyond that they sent robots on a mission tht cost billions of dollars with a maintenance and diagnostic system that could not detect a memory leak. As a result the robots failed on Mars and were only able to be repaired by good luck.
In short software sucks, software technology sucks, software design is done badly, and software implmentation is even worse. In short every new idea in software could and should be patented. A new idea in software, howeve bad, has to be better than the dreadful mess that it is now.
Anonymous,
Welcome back! We've missed you!
It appears that you are in a much worse mood this time, which has fortunately not impacted your ability to spout on for line after line after line about a subject which, frankly, we no longer recall. No worries, I'm sure it was very interesting to the other reader(s) and made you feel much better than those weekly therapy sessions and Thorazine shots.
Kudos!
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