Microsoft granted 10,000th patent

Microsoft received its 10,000th US patent earlier this month.

The software giant, which stepped up its rush to the patent office five years ago, has propelled itself to the upper echelon among patent filers, although IBM still gets more patents issued than any other company. Last year, IBM became the first company to have 4,000 patents issued in a single year.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has risen to the top-five among patent recipients and for the past two years has topped a key ranking of overall patent portfolio strength.

"Logging the 10,000th patent really is a testament to all of the innovation that has been taking place," Microsoft chief patent counsel Bart Eppenauer said in an interview.

However, while its patent filings have been, the company hasn't managed to stay out of the courtroom. The number of patent lawsuits against the company has increased substantially in the past couple of years.

"That increase has come almost entirely from entities that do not produce products," Eppenauer said. Most of the suits have come not from other technology companies, he said, but rather from the firms whose primary business is acquiring and enforcing patents. In those cases, having a large patent arsenal of one's own is of little use, since there are no products that could be used to countersue over.

Microsoft's broader patent portfolio has come in handy in other ways, though, particularly as the company has looked to license its technology to other companies and even to do things like its deal with Novell around Linux.

"Patents really are the currency of innovation in our industry," Eppenauer said.

The 10,000th patent covers a technology used in computers such as Microsoft's Surface that link a real-world object with a set of data or images stored on a computer. Curtis Wong, one of the inventors listed on the patent, said the idea is a simple but powerful one. Basically the idea is taking an object that might be familiar to a person, say a matchbook from their favourite bar, and having the surface computer associate that object with digital information, say one's favourite songs.

Coincidentally, Wong and a colleague were also on Microsoft's 5,000th patent, which covered an approach for linking together a virtual audience of online gaming fans.

Patents have become a bit of a status symbol within the corridors of Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington. The company gives workers up to $1,500 (£1,000) each time they apply for a patent, plus a cube with details on the invention. Once a patent is granted, Microsoft workers get a plaque that includes a copy of the first page of the patent application.

Microsoft's patent filings have become so prolific that it requires a small army to handle the 2,500 to 3,000 US patent applications that the company files each year. It now has more than 100 people in its patent group including more than 40 attorneys, along with analysts, business people as well as paralegals and support staff. For Wong, however, all the patents have started to become a bit of a distraction. "The cubes are blocking my window," said Wong, who is listed on about four dozen patent applications.