July 3rd, 2006
Is Myhrvold now a blast from the past?
In the 1990s Nathan Myhrvold was big. Real big.
As CTO of Microsoft, he was the keeper of the company’s crown intellectual jewels, and expected to be the engine who produced more. Microsoft under his watch amassed one of the world’s great patent portfolios.
But on reading some recent stories about him, I wonder if he isn’t now a man out of his time?
Myhrvold’s new outfit, Intellectual Ventures, is in the patent business. It buys patents, and tries to come up with its own patentable ideas.
Reading a Business Week piece on his process, it sounds a lot like what the Gates Foundation is up to, only Myhrvold aims to profit from the ideas through licensing. But a Fortune piece on him has tech execs giving him a more derogatory name — patent troll. Techdirt calls his approach patent hoarding.
The idea of making a market in patents actually goes against the grain of open source practice, which is that you put the essentials in a shared pot and build innovation on top of it. What was seen as clever in the 1990s is now seen by some as stealing.
This is a major sea change in the history of innovation. Laws that were changed to benefit tech companies in the 1990s are now seen as a hindrance. What happened between times, I think, is that open source proved itself.
What most tech execs want to declare independence from this year, it seems, are lawyers.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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