Economists love to talk about incentives. Without incentives, people wouldn’t go to work, or even get out of bed. People have incentives to do (almost) anything they do. Patents are one way of providing incentives. I won’t claim that the current patent system isn’t used and abused by those who hurt the economy, but without it, there would be little incentive for corporations to produce new research. So I find it a little strange when I hear quotes like this one from Mike Gunderloy (emphasis mine):

I’ve spent the bulk of the last fifteen years developing some amount of reputation and expertise in the Microsoft universe, having published dozens of books and hundreds of articles, worked as an editor and consultant, written (as a subcontractor) parts of various Microsoft products, and so on. I’m also the editor of the Larkware site, which tracks news in the Microsoft software world for developers.

Unfortunately, over that time I’ve also come to the conclusion that, even though it is staffed largely by smart and ethical people, Microsoft itself represents a grave threat to the future of software development through its increasing inclination to stifle competition through legal shenanigans. Its recent attempt to claim that no one can implement a user interface that looks anything like the Office 2007 ribbon without licensing some nebulous piece of intellectual property represents a new low in this regard.

I happen to know that many millions of dollars of research went into this particular aspect of Microsoft Office 2007. This is not an exaggeration by any stretch of the imagination. When the average salary of a high-level developer is over $100k, and a feature like this is developed by 10-40 developers/designers/PMs/GMs/etc over the course of two or three years, you can see how the research for a feature like this is extraordinarily high. This isn’t even counting the extremely costly usability testing that Microsoft does on a feature like this.

Suppose that there was nothing stopping Open Office or Google Docs from copying this user interface verbatim. Would there have been any incentive for Microsoft to do this research in the first place? Would the research have been done? I say the likely answer to these questions is no and no.

And in fact, the claim that “no one can implement a user interface that looks anything like the Office 2007 ribbon” is actually completely wrong. As long as you are developing a product that does not directly compete with Office 2007, you’re welcome to license the technology royalty-free. Jensen Harris has more information about the licensing program.

BTW, I saw this quote on Jeff Atwood’s blog, which is by far my current favorite blog.