Microsoft Shifts Focus, Will Target the Idiots

I’m sure the parents of Timothy Sellers, Heather Grantham, and Joshua Dersch were super proud this Tuesday when their kids were granted a patent so brilliant, so amazing, and so unbelievable, it takes an idiot to appreciate it. The three Microsoft employees submitted and were granted a patent for… wait for it… making Page Up and Page Down move an actual page up or page down – as in a real paper like pages, not today’s annoying screen size sections.

Apparently the patent office agreed with the idea that making a key press move a whole page up or down, not in screen size bites but in some other unit, novel enough for a patent. Let me remind you that in theory, Microsoft now has a 20 years monopoly on moving whole pages up or down with a single key-stroke. The only good thing I have to say about this patent is that it is actually very easy to read and is highly entertaining. For example, in the background for the ground breaking invention they three write:

However, pressing the Page Down or Page Up keyboard buttons to navigate content provides sometimes unexpected results for many viewers. More particularly, unless the zoom percentage setting and/or size of the window is coincidentally set such that an entire page is shown at once, pressing the Page Down or Page up key does not move the content a full page. Such behavior is the default experience in applications. For example, when the zoom is set such that the page is larger than the viewing area, pressing Page Down when at the top of the page does not page down an entire page, but instead shifts the content that is shown in the viewing area such that some lower portion of the current page (e.g., the bottom of the current page) is shown. At least one other Page Down key press is required to shift the view to show the top of the next page. In the opposite direction, at such a zoom percentage more than one Page Up is required to actually shift the content up an entire page.

And it gets better, and by better I mean funnier:

Thus, when a user wants to consistently review a particular area of each page, for example, such as to inspect the content in each page's header or footer, the user has to use multiple key presses per page, unless the user can tolerate (and is knowledgeable enough to know to set) a zoom percentage that causes a Page Up or Page Down to jump the precise amount.

Let me repeat that for you, slower. Microsoft has submitted and granted a patent to help users who find the current behavior of the Page Up and Page Down button too confusing, or those who cannot “tolerate” the buttons’ erratic and “unexpected” behavior. These people are such idiots that, and I quote, are not “knowledgeable enough to know to set a zoom percentage”.

After first reading about this over at the always excellent TechDirt blog, I scratched my head trying to figure out what the hell was Microsoft thinking. I mean, they paid money for this. They paid the employees (it took the combined brain power of three Microsoft engineers), they paid the lawyers, and they paid the patent office.

And then I figured it out. With all the smart users switching over to Mac, Microsoft is forced to focus on the only market segment they still control. The idiots.

Look for this amazing technology in the upcoming Windows Vista Feature Pack which will retail for $24.95.

Comments

[Kyle Brady]

Hey Eran,

Good points, but I think you're looking at this the wrong way.

Microsoft is, and always has been, about collecting as much money as possible, while doing as little as possible. "Stealing" MS-DOS and making huge profits from it, repackaging an OS as a "new" version with very little differences... we've all heard that before.

So why should the keyboard be any different? They could potentially ingest massive profits because unlicensed keyboards (aka "not Microsoft") use the buttons associate with their patent, depending on how the courts interpret the depth.

Also, this might be a play at what I've thought they might do for awhile: try and control and own as much of the computer as possible. As people move to Macs and Linux, it's probably becoming more and more attractive for them to disrupt competitors by simply "owning" the technology. If your keyboard ends up being radically different on a Mac (besides the minimal differences now), users might reconsider switching.

Next they'll concoct a strategy about LCD monitors! haha

--Kyle

[joshzhao]

While I agree that this patent is indeed laughable, I'd like to point out that the authors do have a point: sometimes setting the zoom level is not a solution. I've personally in situations when setting a zoom level that allows the whole page to be shown renders the page illegible. I would say that the authors have identified a need, but I agree with you that there isn't enough meat for a patent. Only Microsoft can afford the legal fees for obtaining such a patent. But hey, they have to be defensive :-)