Rereading your inital post... regarding patents, if MS does the research and comes up with items to patent, why wouldn't they get the patent? Are you saying they should spend the $$ on research and let someone else get the patent because they have too many already?
Whan did MS patent an idea they had? Reverse engineer someone else's software and bankrupt them with legal fees when they complain, yes. Wonder why they can't debug their operating systems, they did not write them! Win7 is what 95 was supposed to be.