The recent months have seen Microsoft strengthen its hold on the Android smartphone market. The Steve Ballmer led software giant finalized a licensing deal today with Compal Electronics. This patent licensing deal is supposed to be the ninth agreement that Microsoft has entered into in the past four months. Compal, one of the world’s largest Original Design Manufacturers (ODM), is a Taiwanese company which makes third party tablet PCs and smartphones. It has also reported an annual turnover of around 28 billion US dollars.
The recent headlines have been dominated by various lawsuits like Apple suing Samsung and Oracle suing Google for patent violation. This has created an unhealthy rivalry among the Android smartphone producing companies with the consumers being the victim in some cases. Samsung trying to ban the sale of iPhone 4S in certain countries is one such case that comes to mind.
On the other hand, Microsoft has been trying to effectively allow the use of patented Android products for the general license holders. Since Microsoft has finalized the patent license deals with almost 50 per cent of the Android OEMs in the United States, this helps to allow new innovations and reduce the number of patent violation lawsuits.
The Executive Vice President of Microsoft has released a press statement that they believe in providing the best service to their customers and constantly strive to produce new innovations. They respect the patent rights of other partners and through license agreements they wish to create improved technologies in order to expand their market.
Hence they have been procuring patent licenses from other companies over the past years at an expense of 4.5 billion US dollars. They want to minimize the problems which arise when the software violates other company’s patents. The 1,133 license agreements finalized by Microsoft expresses their desire to eliminate infringement problems that have plagued the software market.
The companies that produce Android devices and market them under their brand name are referred to as Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM). Some major OEMs like Samsung have also entered into agreements with Microsoft to share patents. This is a major development as it allows both parties to manufacture better Android devices and reduce complications arising from trivial lawsuits.
Many experts had stated that there was no feasible solution to the Android patent license problem. However, Microsoft has shown the way to other companies by entering into mutual license agreements that benefits all parties involved.
