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My first patent!

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Speaking of auto complete, I got my first patent! It's some email address autocomplete stuff from my MacOE days. You can read it here if you have nothing better to do.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 10, 2004
    Congratulations Dan!!! :-)

  • Anonymous
    December 10, 2004
    Congratulations. Remember to post a picture of you patent cube :)
  • Anonymous
    December 10, 2004
    Congratulations, Dan! This clearly shows us how innovative Microsoft is. You are such a genius, I mean, finally we have an example for a US patent from Microsoft that stands for a really innovative new idea! I hope you'll be famous some day, you deserve your place in the history books as "the man who invented auto-completion".
  • Anonymous
    December 11, 2004
    Hurray! Another idiotic patent! Aren't you people ashamed of contributing to the stiffling of innovation? Of making small software developers living in fear? When will the madness end?

    Thank you for making this world a better place.
  • Anonymous
    December 11, 2004
    Someone needs to fix patents...
  • Anonymous
    December 11, 2004
    I'm sure you've seen how often Microsoft gets sued for this sort of thing. Getting patents is a great defensive strategy, no matter what you think of the patent process.
  • Anonymous
    December 11, 2004
    "Getting patents is a great defensive strategy, no matter what you think of the patent process."

    If Microsoft was really interested in combating obvious "inventions" such as this one, it would lobby to correct the problem. Sorry, the "everyone's doing it" defense is without merit.

    As for you, Dan, congradulations on implementing the feature, but you should still be ashamed. You and your employer are abusing intellectual property laws to stifle competition.

    Frivolous patents like this that don't pass the smell test to professionals as to their non-obviousness are tatamount to fraud and lying to the federal government if the applicant is just trying to slide something under the door in the name of increasing their "defensive" patent portfolio. Just because the reviewers at the USPTO are too undertrained/overworked to understand software "innovation" doesn't mean you should take advantage of it any more than someone should avoid taxes by faking business expenses just because the IRS doesn't look closely enough at them.
  • Anonymous
    December 11, 2004
    The comment has been removed