Paul Allen Sues Big Tech

It must be getting hard out there to be a billionaire. Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, has filed a patent infringement suit against many of the big names in the technology business: AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, Office Max, Staples and Yahoo.

Let’s see. Who’s missing? A little company in Redmond which is the main reason Paul Allen is a billionaire in the first place. Must… protect… shareholder… value…

Forbes has posted much of the complaint. TechFlash noted that Amazon.com, a new tenant of Allen’s Vulcan Real Estate in South Lake Union, is also notably absent from the list. I think it has less to do with favoritism then proximity: If Allen had a dispute with Amaozon, he could probably give Jeff Bezos a jingle and invite him and his lawyers over to the mansion or the yacht to discuss a mutually agreeable settlement over a latte. Not saying that’s what happened. But it’s fun to imagine.

The lawsuit concerns Interval Research, an Allen-funded Silicon Valley laboratory (now defunct) that worked in close collaboration with Google in the 1990s, among other companies. This was when Paul Allen was throwing a lot of his money into internet companies, before he discovered there was better money in football.

As an idea company, Interval Research’s value was in its intellectual property, hence the patents. Of course, in the Bay Area, ideas are like viruses, bouncing from host to host until they latch on to someone genetically predisposed to that sort of infection.

Can you think of a Bay Area company that has produced a huge and diverse list of products and wacky ideaseven has its own “Labs”over the last decade and exploited those products to market domination. Hint: It’s motto is still “Don’t Be Evil.” It was probably only a matter of time before someone decided they were owed a piece of it.

Meanwhile, Yahoo is no longer the No. 2 search engine in the U.S. Microsoft’s Bing now is, since Bing is now the engine behind Yahoo. Let’s have a moment of silence for the passing of the old Yahoo, and its legions of human Yahoos trying to catalog the entire internet, who made the internet something worth spending time on. As opposed to billions in real money.