throwitaway2

"Innovation is key" is a mantra that sounds good, but it's not true. It's what people want to believe. It's like saying you need to constantly buy lottery tickets so you don't risk being a poor retiree.

If you have established a business and you bank on "innovation" your likelihood of anything from a net loss to catastrophic failure is actually quite high. In the long run, most companies fail anyway, whether they attempt to innovate or not.

Case in point, those companies that did survive in the S&P 500 since its inception don't strike me as particularly innovative:

http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2017...

> The fact is to the company and the current legal climate around patents I can assure you each of those patents are worth more than the $$$ they where paying out.

That's utter nonsense. Most patents are absolutely worthless. Even the odd patent that you might find, where you can litigate still requires a risky and costly litigation process.

It's more likely that the company paid too much money to generate too few valuable patents, which is why they scaled back the program. Now that they did find one that is somewhat valuable to them, they want it and they tasked this poor middle manager to get it. But they're also not willing to spend more than 25,000$ on it. So how can this patent be that valuable? It just isn't.

Your numbers don't apply. If those patents were really that valuable (they generally aren't) and the company had the money to pay "senior engineers" 300k then they wouldn't be cutting the compensation like that to save costs. As quoted, he patent/code in question is worth a measly 25,000$ to the company. It's a joke. Nobody in this whole story is a big deal. There's no billion dollar patents here, for the likes of Google or Samsung to fight over.