Yellowish Hue?!

The NTP vs RIM affair has left me with a very bitter taste in my mouth. Basically it seems to me that the judge, James R. Spencer, lacked the balls to make the right decision and urged the parties to settle so he didn't have to.
RIM have now paid around 600 million to prevent a nasty surprise. I understand the business logic, but from an ethical point of view, the whole thing stinks.

Will it now be swept under the carpet, or will the high profile this case had prompt the authorities to instigate some major patent law reform (and push the distinctly yellowish James R. Spencer into early retirement!)

While we are on the subject of RIM, I have never understood its dominance of the market. I mean, it's just push email, how hard is that!? Technically they do nothing substantial, but they have the interface, and that's what counts. Early adopters can use all kinds of other technical solutions to the push email 'problem', but for the masses, it just has to work, cleanly and simply. Blackberry does that better than anyone else; for now.

If you hold Blackberry stock, then you've done well and will will probably continue to do for a while. But the honeymoon period will not last forever and their barrier to entry for competitors is not that high, unless, as I've said before that they accept the patent was valid and pay the money, just to cement a very big barrier to entry!