This week Microsoft has joined Oracle in the lawsuit against Google. The allegation is that Google has copied thirty-seven application interfaces of Oracle’s Java software platform into the Android system. Oracle already lost a lawsuit in 2012 against Google, but now Oracle is appealing.
In my opinion, Microsoft started to use these opportunities of demanding more software protection as a political tool. In other words, they will not only support patent litigations to protect the application software industry, but also compensate its own constant legal problems for unfair competition. The company doesn’t want to be seen in the tech market as the bad guy anymore, especially against Google, the big competitor in the web search, mobile and e-mail services, and a strong supporter of open source organizations.
As Mario Puzo would say: “finance is a gun, and politics is knowing when to pull the trigger” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099674/quotes). These legal actions could represent a political strategy to anticipate future investors’ considerations in unusual or infrequent charges as a normal part of Microsoft’s operations, thus affecting the non-GAAP analysis in the company’s earnings and EPS ratio. The company could say in these possible situations “we may lose this lawsuit, but we will win this other one,” and make everything still seem like not something extraordinary.
Yet, lawsuits are becoming more common nowadays in the tech industry, especially when there are new start-ups “whose sole purpose to develop software is not to create new solutions, but to generate lawsuits and make this a profitable business” (WSJ Blog: http://allthingsd.com/20121211/the-only-thing-worse-than-the-patent-wars-you-are-reading-about-are-the-ones-you-arent-reading-about/). In every competitive industry, especially where heroes and villains appear daily, earnings depend mostly on a company’s reputation; and definitely Microsoft is “guarding it with its own life” as the 5th law of Robert Greene would affirm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_48_Laws_of_Power).
