Re: Microsoft the patent troll - and it's slave, Nokia

Speaking as an ex-S60 fella, that's a bit glib. Nokia's true innovation was always in hardware and bits of the stack so low-level that they may as well be hardware (radio signalling, etc). These patents are often "real" ie reflect real cleverness and are still relevant for producing phones as Nokia still does - to call this trolling simply debases the term. Of course I'm sure they're exercising other flimsy patents too because (a) when loading a blunderbuss you care more about the quantity of shit rammed down the muzzle than the quality and (b) all companies do this, otherwise their shareholders/boards should ask why they aren't pursuing returns (it's crap, but how the game is playing right now).

And as for Nokia software, well the organisation had been rotting for years, ever-larger, ever-slower, usability issues deflected with the mantra "works as designed" so that internal testers learnt not to bother raising defects, kludges bolted atop hacks to such a depth that down in the infernal gloom there might even be diamonds forming, though probably just coal from fossilised "software architects", still trapped in a strategising session... you can taste the disdain of the Kernel engineers that when required to add a mechanism for a process to be launched with yet bigger stacks to accommodate the newest reeking pile of shims and frameworks they called it "CreateWithStackOverride()" rather than just adding a third Create() overload.

So along with some excellent hardware guys Elop especially fired a load of people who though often individually bright and surprisingly often even still motivated were trapped in a dysfunctional hairball and producing too little value too late. Good riddance to us all! Think of it like a forest - once a tree is senescent all it does is lock up nutrients and block out light - let it fall, let it rot, let the good parts flow out to build newer and healthier things (for a while, till those plants in their turn become wizened)