Microsoft Buys Over 800 AOL Patents for $1 Billion

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why do i keep thinking of doctor evil when they bring up the billion dollars.. lol its kinda hilarious .. and aol well ... i mean i guess if you live in the country thats probobly the best your going to get ... thankfully for me .. i can get at least 24Mbit here in indianapolis
 
[citation][nom]phamhlam[/nom]Facebook buys Instagram for $1 Billion.Now MSFT buys AOL for $1 Billion. Man, people are getting loaded.[/citation]
Microsoft did NOT buy AOL. They bought patents that previously belonged to AOL. HUGE difference.

[citation][nom]applegetsmelaid[/nom]3.3 MILLION people are still paying for AOL?[/citation]
Not even close. AOL switched their BYOA accounts from paid to free accounts. The only AOL users that actually pay for AOL, are those dumb enough to sign up for "premium services" that can be acquired for 10% of the cost separately....and those that are stuck on dialup. AOL has been surviving on ad-based revenue for almost a decade now.....and seemingly losing money hand over first since the merger with Time-Warner in 1998. Even splitting from Time-Warner doesn't appear to be saving them.
 
In Michigan you can get free dial-up. In lots of areas people can only get dial-up/satellite internet. At my moms house its like that and every-time i visit i bring my 3G phone and get faster speeds then even Satellite internet.
 
I hope MSFT didnt throw away cash for a dying company. But then again, they may have truly good patents that will become useful soon.
 
I don't know what's worse. That Microsoft has 800 new patents, or that AOL has a billion dollars to keep it alive longer.

The concerning things about AOL patents is that they must be pretty old, because AOL has not been relevant in a long time. Is MS trying to take ownership of some fundamental usage aspect of the internet? What could AOL have that MS would want badly enough to spend that much money on?
 
Microsoft may not be the big well known dog like it once was since the Internet and technologies explosive growth in the past 10 years, but they're doing the right thing and securing their future. Just look at IBM. Their massive investments in R&D and patents make them incredibly powerful, also the services on the side don't help.

Always a love hate thing with patents though, although I'm sure AOL has some very nice ones given its major influence in the early Internet days.
 
I still use AOL. Blame boredom. Occasionally I go to the chat rooms for kicks. Unfortunately they haven't been regulated for nearly 10 years and it's no where near chat as we use to know it.

Obviously I switched over to free BYOA as soon as it was available.
 
It wouldn't surprise me at all if a good chunk of those patents had to do with AIM. MSFT just bought Skype. Now they may either control or have license to all AIM patents. They already had MSN instant messenger. So perhaps they're trying to tackle and own the sms-become-IM arena on smartphones. "Why should texing be limited to just cell phones? Now you can send a text message from anything to anything using Microsoft Windows 8..." I could see that being their goal.
 
I've been trying to get my parents off AOL for years. They don't have dial-up anymore but they still use the AOL client. I groan every time my dad calls with a problem with the client.
 

Since, they most likely won't tell us what the patents are we may never know. Unless they sue somebody using a similar technology.
 

I like the sound of that actually.
 
o'comon mr douglas 'Mao' perry what no trolling for an uproar in stirring the patent pot on how patents should be free for all and the capitalist patent system is broken or dead.

i'm going to laugh when microsoft starts suing people for using it's newly aquired patents that are about to expire and there isn't a thing you can do about it except smirk as you right up that story on your macbook air with apple OS to stir the capitalist patent system should be killed off, while Thomas is doing a relevant hardware article and playing the hottest new games on a PC!
 
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