It kind of blows my mind that patents can possibly be worth north of a millon dollars apiece. How is this possible? How does it make economic sense, especially the idea of buying 800 bundled together instead of picking and choosing the ones which actually have value.<p>I get that they win litigation, but is even the loss of a lawsuit more costly than the amount spent on purchasing the patents? The most costly lawsuit loss I can recall was Microsoft's antitrust loss, which cost it 9 figures. But even so, that's a case where patents would not have helped. And if it costs more to buy the patents than they recoup with when they win, or do not lose, the suits, how does it make economic sense to buy them?<p>Then again, maybe they're considering it an investment in their ongoing campaign to extort the android ecosystem.
Two snarky comments are fighting in my head.<p>Comment 1: "Microsoft's buying patents for a long-defunct browser demonstrates once again that these are solely legal weapons, not bits of useful knowledge to help make products."<p>Comment 2: "I don't know, maybe IE is just that far behind."
Microsoft is already loaded with patents, my guess is that want to cover their bases even more and probably go after Google (Motorola forced them to move out of Germany)