Reiffin filed a suit in a US District Court in San
Jose last month alleging that Microsoft has
infringed on his patents covering a process called
preemptive multithreading. Reiffin charges that his
patented process is being used in a long list of
software products, including Microsoft Office,
Windows 95, the not-yet-released Windows 98,
Windows NT Server and Workstation, Internet
Explorer, Word, Excel, and others - essentially
the company’s entire product line.
Virtually all commercial software on the market
uses multithreading - which allows two or more
sets of operations to be executed simultaneously
in a single program - but Reiffin says he's suing
Microsoft "because they have 90 percent of the
market."
"They asked Willie Sutton: 'Why do you rob a
bank?' And he answered, 'Because that's where
the money is,'" said Reiffin, a former IBM patent
attorney who says he retired after his hobby of
tinkering with hi-fi amplifiers turned him into a
multimillionaire.
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