For over five years Microsoft and Google have been in a bitter feud about patent royalties stretching over twenty lawsuits in the US and Germany over Android and Xbox. Motorola (owned by Google) at the time demanded insanely high royalties for the use of video encoding in the Xbox, and Microsoft demanded Google pay for the use of its technologies in their popular Android software.
But it seems like Nadella has made an impact over at Google and the two companies have agreed to drop all litigation against each other.
“The companies pledged in a statement to work together in other ways related to intellectual property, including development of a royalty-free, video-compression technology to speed downloads, in an initiative that also involves Amazon.com Inc. and Netflix Inc. They will also lobby for specific rules on a unified patent system throughout Europe.”
This isn’t the first time Nadella has made friends in Silicon Valley. He’s buried the hatchet with Salesforce and DropBox, and recently Microsoft featured a prominent spot on the Apple stage upselling the new iPad Pro, and Nadella even used the iPhone on stage at their own events.
Does this mean Google will finally develop and integrate their software into Windows 10? Well it’s still a long shot, but it could happen.
