Shortly after Google's top lawyer called out Microsoft and Apple for ganging up on his company by combining to outbid Google in the recent Nortel patent auction, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith fired back. http://www.androidcentral.com/editorial-keep-it-courtroom-folks

Smith claims that Google was invited to join the consortium which was actually put together to allow the members to defend themselves against smaller patent trolls. Now I'm no lawyer but having watched the software patent train wreck since the mid 1990s, I've got a few ideas (which may well be completely off-base) about Google's thinking here.

From Google's perspective their real patent problem revolves around Android and efforts by Microsoft, Apple and Oracle to derail its momentum with patent claims. While small patent trolls are a real problem, they are not Google's priority right now. Google's reason for buying the Nortel patents would be as a defensive maneuver against its large rivals.

If Google had opted to join the consortium, it's a good bet that the deal would have included some provision that those patents could not be used in either an offensive or defensive way against the other members of the group. That means that they would've been no use to Google in its current legal proceedings. For Google to use these patents defensively they would probably need to have sole ownership.

That's probably why Google has turned its attention and money toward acquiring other available patents. In the long run, this may yet come back to bite Google if the consortium opts to attack based on the Nortel patents as well but this may be less of an issue since those are apparently mostly related to hardware, a segment in which Google doesn't really participate.

Reshared post from +Jerry Hildenbrand

Yes, Apple and Microsoft are still evil. Glad to see someone at Google come right out and say it.

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Google's chief legal officer calls patent war 'a hostile, organized campaign against Android' | Android Central
Google We've heard the cries. "Why isn't Google fighting back on the patent front?!?!" Trust us, there are people in suits working on this every day.

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NATO alliance defeated the Soviet Union led Warsaw pact without ever firing a shot on the battlefield. The stronger western economies essentially allowed the United States to finance an arms race with the Soviets that drove the eastern bloc into bankruptcy. Because the excessive spending on the military starved the populace of economic advancement, the political system in the east eventually collapsed under its own weight. Victory came at the expense of fulfilling President Dwight Eisenhower's worst nightmare upon his retirement of an overly powerful military-industrial complex.Unfortunately following an all-too brief respite in the 1990s, military spending in the United States took off again following the turn of the century to the degree that even without counting the insane cost of all the wars that we are fighting right now, the US is spending more on its military in inflation adjusted dollars than at any time since the second world war.As of 2011, the US accounts for 47% of the entire planet's military spending, meaning that we just about spend more than the rest of the world combined. We spend 8 times more than China. It is this profligate spending on expensive weapons systems we don't really need (like the F35 and new aircraft carriers) plus huge outlays to contractors that no one either side seems willing to touch, that is driving this country into insolvency. Only a group of middle eastern countries including Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iraq, UAE and others spend a larger percentage of GDP on the military. Tax cuts and slashing the social safety net will not fix what ails the United States. We need to end these wars now and slash the military.

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War Room: Will military spending bankrupt the U.S.?
Our debt problems stem from the fact that we're pouring more money into the Pentagon than we have since WWII

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