I’ve also come across another interesting article of a quite respected CMS industry figure, Kas Thomas, who described his motivation when applying for the patent for a context sensitive favicon while he was at Novell. Basically Novell payed a great amount of money to people contributing for patents. The guy(s) filing this patent might just have this kind of bonus promised – which explains why they’re applying for a patent that is clearly doubtful to be rightfully claimed.

You have done here a thorough research that MSFT should have done before applying.
MSFT’s appliance is, from my point of view, arrogant and unrespectful of the work done by others, starting with E. Tufte.

Fabrice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographic_mosaic#Intellectual_property

This rather dubious patent was granted, but is now under review.

Colin E.

Thank you for highlighting that feature, I was not aware of it. If this is the case and you have not already contacted the US patent office, I would recommend doing so.

I look forward to reading your blog entry on this subject.

Graham

A not very well known feature of MicroCharts is that it can size itself based on the size of the containing cell. You have to uncheck the bar-with or the aspect-ratio parameter and MicroCharts will calculate the bar-with or the aspect-ratio so that the MicroCharts fits into the cell. Therefor MicroCharts clearly qualifies as prior art and the MS patent is pointless.

I did some research on other Microsoft patents and fond a couple of other patent applications in my domain (Excel and BI) where Microsoft clams do have invented things others have done years ago. I will blog about that later on

http://blog.xlcubed.com/

Andreas