Re: Questel/Micropat/Plenum/etc. owe me your lives !!!! :-)
(no name) ((no email))
Fri, 20 Oct 95 13:03 GMT
Greg,
I have observed your tenacious and draining self laudatory crap for the past
two years on other news groups and now find your latest the height of
egomania. First off, if Microsoft had hired you I am sure any of their
stockholders who have been subject to your haranguing over the years would
have bailed out of the company and what professional in their right mind
would ever be "hired" by you.
If you took the time to research before blabbing you would have found some
"conduit" providers doing a damn good job of making patent information
available for free or almost free. Go on the micropat.com site and one can
see "free" the front page of any patent back to 1974 and soon EPO & PCT
added. Since you seem to be so good at the math, you tell us all how much it
costs to make 4,000 cd's available for downloading, two Sun servers,a T1
line, a full time webmaster (who doesn't spend his time blabbing on news
groups all day) two weeks of searchable fulltext (again free) patents by
class (again free, and updated classes each 6 months unlike out of date
classes on your server). Plus all the programming associated.
Now let's talk about your dinner. I bought you dinner in Boston and
attempted to get your participation in our early web efforts so that your
"free" constituency group could get "free" images over the net and if you
remember you pooh poohed offering images over the net because "it would slow
down your beloved internet." Well, there are now about 4,000 inventors
looking at front pages "free" of charge and getting help from micropatent
all in spite of your efforts. Maybe if we had flown you to Europe and wined
and dined you as you told us Derwent did, you would have nice things to say
about us also? Perhaps you would even examine our site and make encouraging
remarks as you did last week about Derwent?
Perhaps if we, and orbit, and other "parasites" you always refer to, took
donations we could make all of our products available free. But alas, how
could we pay the hundreds of people we now employ?
There's your problem, if you really got a job (instead of begging donations)
you would shortly find out that it is necessary to produce revenue to pay
yourself. Or better still, if you hired someone (provided you could find a
sole to work for you) you would find they have to eat.
So, all i can say to you is, GET A JOB, and please do not ruin this news
group as you have ruined every other news group you have found on the net.
peter tracy
MicroPatent
>
> These recent exchanges on the future of the patent data industry reminded
>me of an incident which makes all of you patent conduit providers extremely
>indebted to me. It also reminded me of how some of you can be clueless about
>the future as long as you continue to deny the ease of making patent data
>freely available.
>
> One year ago a brief article appeared in Business Week about my Internet
>Patent Web Site. It appeared in the Technology to Watch column, and got me
>some nice publicity. In particular, shortly thereafter, I got a call from a
>headhunter working for Microsoft. At the time, Microsoft was looking to hire
>someone to head up a project to develop an online patent database (I guess fo
r
>MSN), and given what I had done with my Web site, I suppose I am the perfect
>person for the job.
>
> At the time, I declined the opportunity (though I suppose I should have
>gone along long enough to get a trip out to Seattle), partly because I don't
>think Microsoft would have wanted to pay the outrageous salary I wanted,
>though I suppose I should have asked first.
>
> In any event, had I taken the job, I suspect I would have been given
>funding to: a) buy the full text and images of all available US software
>patents, b) buy a few small companies with very sophisticated syntactic and
>semantic text retrieval systems (at least a generation ahead of what all of
>you have), and c) hire a few fellow searchers to incorporate their experience
s
>into b) to access a). It could have been a killer system, especially as give
n
>my software prior art database, I know where everything is and could have
>pick and choosen the coolest search techniques.
>
> I also suspect that the resulting system would have been offered for
>a tenth of the cost that you all are charging now for conduit access (say
>in the $5-$10/hr range), plus come out with a line of CDROMs a tenth of the
>cost that you all are charging. With Microsoft's market share, facilities
>and clout, they could have made many tens of millions a year on offering such
>products, if not more.
>
> So with Microsoft's resources and my skills and connections, many of
>you would have been in big trouble. So instead of all of the hassling coming
>my way, a few thank yous would be nice. In fact, any of you at the AIPLA
>show next week can buy me dinner - I know some nice resteraunts near
>Georgetown.
>
> Unfortunately, I am not irreplaceable, so I suspect Microsoft ended up
>hiring someone else, so I would be very, very, very nervous. Though if
>Microsoft is still looking, maybe I will accept just to illustrate all of
>the assertions I have made to you that are being shot down :-)
>
> 100-200 gigabytes text databases are becoming high school projects. To
>assume otherwise is very shortsighted. And if I get an offer from Microsoft,
>I will give you a chance to make a counteroffer not to take the job :-)
>
>
>Greg Aharonian
>Internet Patent News Service
>
>
--
Peter H. Tracy, President <pht@ns.micropat.com> Phone: 203-466-5055
250 Dodge Ave., East Haven, CT 06512-3358 Fax: 203-466-5054