Microsoft Granted Pizza Delivery Patent

from the this-is-patentable? dept

theodp writes “Thanks to Microsoft, just ordering a pizza can now constitute patent infringement. Microsoft, who’s been publicly whining about low-quality patents, was granted a patent Tuesday for a Method and system for providing service listings in electronic yellow pages, which grants it a 17-year exclusive right to the process of including pizza joints not physically located in a search area in search results if they’ll deliver a large pepperoni-with-extra-cheese within the search area. “


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Comments on “Microsoft Granted Pizza Delivery Patent”

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20 Comments
John says:

Re: Re: Grrr

It’ll help you in a good way. Infrastructure like this is why there are cool things like search based pizza delivery. Google, MS, Yahoo, and the like can justify spending hundreds and thousands in salaries and infrastructure because they can get a patent.

It seems you want a world where nobody can patent processes. Fine, but your world does not have services either (I think you’ll find what you are looking for northeast of Portland). For the rest of us, this stuff does not code itself up for free (Linux and Firefox have a quiver of patents as well).

John Lewin says:

Re: Again...

Gates has stepped down from his role as chairman. I believe its Balmer you are hoping to chastise?

Also, ‘a computer on every desktop’ was, in fact, the goal of microsoft in the 90’s. Their current goal is, taking some liberties with language, to make operating systems and software invisible so you can focus on what you are doing (for example, posting comments on the internet.) So what they want is for you to get access to services without ever dealing with any of the stuff in the middle. Eg: if you want a pizza, you get a pizza.

This is also precisely what Google wants, FYI. Hope that helps.

Anonymous Coward says:

No Subject Given

I read the patent and aside from all the legalese garb, I am still at a loss. What did they invent? Nothing, to me it simply sounds like they are just adding information to a database to include regional businesses. Of course their logic is flawed, because their resoning assumes that all busineses would want to be listed on the net. I am sure that some of the mobile plumbers could care less about this. We all know that word of mouth sells better than anything else.

pizza squirrel says:

Sun was doing this in Mt. View 20 years ago

The local food outlets had order systems, and modems printing out orders at least in 1985 or so, and there was a demo system that would find a pizza joint based on various things, by doing a spiral search till it hit a match in the enclosed area nearly that long.

Obvious and done, so why not patent it. that seems to be what the USPTO does these days. Useless till someone with real power gets hit by one of these silly patents and stops this somehow.

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