IBM Remains US Patent Leader
by Taylor Flatt on January 14th, 2009 at 8:32 pm EDT - 521 views
IBM, for 16 straight years, has dominated in most patents per year. This year, they have topped off at over 4,000. IBM managed to beat out their challenger Samsung by 671 patents. IBM said this in their official release, “IBM’s 2008 patent issuances are nearly triple Hewlett-Packard’s and exceed the issuances of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google – combined.” However, HP fired back saying they are seeking quality of the patents, not quantity.
While IBM grabbed 11.5 technical patents per day last year, they are looking to increase their technical production by upwards of 50%. This seems pretty odd to me that IBM is the leader in patents. I would think that companies like Microsoft or even Sony would be towards the top of this list. It just seems that many people have forgotten about the hero of old that rivaled Microsoft in the beginning.