Here are a couple of examples of companies not buying patents that could have made them billions.
It’s fair to call Netscape a dinosaur of technology — after all, the web browser launched 22 years ago, which is eons in in Silicon Valley time. But the company played a vital role in the way tech develops through the antitrust lawsuit it won against Microsoft, a decision with implications that still influence the industry today. Yet while Netscape won that battle, it eventually lost the browser war — but not before selling itself off to AOL for $4.2 billion.
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One of the first Digital Video Recorders, or DVRs, to come to market — and a brand so successful it became a verb — TiVo to this day puts out some of the best set-top boxes on the planet. But the company is on this list because it played nice when it should have dominated. For instance, instead of suing when cable companies rolled out their own DVRs, TiVo waited to see if they could work out a deal, because it was reliant on the TV providers. Then, rather than marketing how much better TiVo boxes were than cable DVRs, the company tamed its revolutionary commercial-skipping features. And finally, when TiVo did sue, it was too late — cable company DVRs were everywhere. TiVo won all its patent infringement cases, bringing home $1.6 billion that has sustained the company to this day. But considering that many consumers think TiVo went out of business, in the end, did it really win? Maybe, because we can at least thank it for popularizing DVRs.
