Among all the companies out there that are arguably violating these patents, they choose to go after a high profile, successful, primarily online company who has been in business using these technologies for years. This is highly selective and to me indicates that the GP's point probably has some validity. Can anyone really argue that Salesforce of all companies has somehow infringed on Microsoft's IP? If they had been enforcing these patents earlier on and enforcing them uniformly, it would have seemed much less of a patent-troll style maneuver.