The company received its 10,000th patent, US number 7,479,950, on January 20. The technology provides users with a simplified method of reassociating data elements represented on an interactive display surface.
Microsoft now holds more than 10,000 issued US patents and has 17,000 applications pending with the USPTO. Outside the US, it holds 7,000 issued patents and has more than 24,000 pending applications.
"We feel that patents are the currency of innovation," Microsoft's chief patent counsel, Bart Eppenauer, told Managing IP yesterday.
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| Bart Eppenauer |
Eppenauer said that the company noticed a discrepancy several years ago between the amount of money invested in research and development and the number of patents protecting the results of those efforts, and revised its patent strategy accordingly.
Such heightened efforts to patent its technology have often earned Microsoft the wrath of the open source community.
But recent interoperability commitments and licensing agreements indicate a slow but growing trend toward collaboration with those sectors. The company also has more than 500 licensing agreements in place.
"We believe in open innovation and collaboration, and that patents serve as a good bridge to those collaborations," said Eppenauer. "Today, so many companies move in heterogeneous environments and work with mixed source models, and that's what our customers are wanting and demanding."
Addressing the considerably higher number of patents owned by competitor IBM, Eppenauer said: "We really focus on trying to achieve the right balance. What matters is that our portfolio remains strategically in line with our business model."
Last month, IBM became the first company to be issued more than 4,000 US patents in one year, surpassing the total number of patents earned by Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google combined.
But Microsoft recently topped a list of its own. The IEEE Spectrum 's December 2008 patent scorecard ranked Microsoft first overall in the category of computer software for the second consecutive year. The survey measures overall patent quality based on factors including the total number of patents held, portfolio growth, the range of technologies influenced by the portfolio and the number of times a company's patents are cited by other patents in the previous five years.
Although Eppenauer admitted that the economic downturn might force his team to "take a close look and possibly make some minor adjustments" to its R&D strategy in the future, he predicted that the company would continue to steadily file between 2,500 and 3,000 patent applications per year and to make "large and strong investments as we move forward".
