Microsoft software story is not news

Dennis Byron writes on the Seeking Alpha web site that a Fortune story earlier this week where a Microsoft executive claimed that open source software violated a number of the company’s patents was not news.

Byron wrote, “There is a breathless sense that this claim and all the background and forward looking that derive from it is new news. Thank the mainstream business media for that (Business Week followed with a story). The IT tabloids and blogosphere piled on. Why? This is not new news.

“In fact, if I were a cynic, I’d almost say the vaunted Microsoft PR machine purposely planned the timing of the Brad Smith interview with Fortune so the story would break on top of—and ‘push down’—news out of last week’s Red Hat Summit and JavaOne. But the Microsoft PR machine is not as good as the Microhaters always give it credit for. And I’m trying not to be a cynic now that I am a ‘senior analyst.’

“Since Microsoft has thousands of patents and it won’t say which 200 of them are involved in its claim, all bloggers and opinion makers can do at this time is wax philosophical. They’d be better off waiting until something new happened.”

Read more here. He then lists five reasons why the story was not news.