Nathan Myhrvold Quotes

At Linkabit, we put little effort and energy into patenting things.

It's very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable - broadly, that's a good thing - in the case of patents, many that own them aren't in a good position to take the next step.

Tomorrow I will have new competitors such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook coming into my garden. I'd rather focus on the competition of tomorrow than combine with the competition of today.

Nokia's industry-leading intellectual property has the potential to create significant value for our licensees and our shareholders.

Strategy means making clear-cut choices about how to compete.

Every piece of software written today is likely going to infringe on someone else's patent.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet - basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

A strategy delineates a territory in which a company seeks to be unique.

I think you would find almost anyone who stands up for their patent rights has been called a patent troll.

I always recommend, if you can, to patent or protect whatever your idea is. If you can't, you have to make your best judgment. Sometimes people don't get anywhere because they sit on something, so afraid to reveal it. And yet, in the reverse, sometimes if you expose something too widely, you can risk losing it.

Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can strangle competition and can limit what economists call 'incremental innovation' - innovations that build, in some way, on others.

It's not easy being number two. As a marketer, you have limited choices - you can pretend you're not defined by the market leader, or, you can embrace your position and go directly after your nemesis.

The essential element of successful strategy is that it derives its success from the differences between competitors with a consequent difference in their behavior.

To disclose too much of one's inventions and achievements is one and the same thing as to give up the fruit of one's ingenuity.

There is a healthy competition as there would be in any business. But we do not spend our days thinking about what Marvel is doing.

When we began Qualcomm, it had become quite clear that it was very important to patent new ideas.

Just as predatory animals follow a similar general design and behave in similar ways, so organizations, especially those in competition with one another, must follow certain design principles if they are to succeed and prevail.

It's really hard to run a business against somebody who is not acting as if it were in business.

Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent.

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different.

If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete.

Competitive strategies is a concept or philosophy that's as American as apple pie.

'Product life' is measured in months, not years, and as soon as you introduce a 'product,' understand that others in your business are going to reverse engineer it to duplicate the results after they circumnavigate the patents, the trademarks, and the intellectual property.

Business is the systematic playing of games.

Firms that claim domain focus are late movers.