It kind of blows my mind that patents can possibly be worth north of a millon dollars apiece. How is this possible? How does it make economic sense, especially the idea of buying 800 bundled together instead of picking and choosing the ones which actually have value.

I get that they win litigation, but is even the loss of a lawsuit more costly than the amount spent on purchasing the patents? The most costly lawsuit loss I can recall was Microsoft's antitrust loss, which cost it 9 figures. But even so, that's a case where patents would not have helped. And if it costs more to buy the patents than they recoup with when they win, or do not lose, the suits, how does it make economic sense to buy them?

Then again, maybe they're considering it an investment in their ongoing campaign to extort the android ecosystem.

Try 1.67 BILLION for a single patent. The jury’s verdict allowed $1.17 billion in lost profits and $504 million in royalties.

http://www.hgexperts.com/article.asp?id=6726

Here comes the leviathan. I don't know what effect this will eventually have on Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, but I'm certain it will be good.

I doubt they're coming after Chrome and Firefox. Given that they've never sued Linux directly (only companies that sell products with Linux bundled -- e.g. Tom Tom), they don't seem to have any interest in going after free software (or just freeware in general) directly.

More likely, this is to strengthen their case in the mobile patent wars, given that every smartphone comes with a bundled browser. In particular, they have an ongoing dispute with Motorola.

This is the more cunning way. Something like Linux would be hard to sue, and people would be faster to notice and cry foul. By picking your targets carefully you can efficiently make the whole industry scared to use an 'undesired' technology. Expect more of this, especially in mobile.

It's not just about scaring people away from technologies. Microsoft's Android patent licensing is a multi-billion dollar business in its own right.

Two snarky comments are fighting in my head.

Comment 1: "Microsoft's buying patents for a long-defunct browser demonstrates once again that these are solely legal weapons, not bits of useful knowledge to help make products."

Comment 2: "I don't know, maybe IE is just that far behind."

I bet the first line of the deal was: "Don't fuck with us anymore please."

So now they will be suing Mozilla?

The Netscape Public License included a patent grant. So that's probably not possible. They might sue anybody not based off Netscape code, though...

Microsoft is already loaded with patents, my guess is that want to cover their bases even more and probably go after Google (Motorola forced them to move out of Germany)