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Telecom & Wireless

Microsoft Gets Sued On VoIP

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Competitors won’t leave Microsoft (MSFT) alone. Time Warner (TWX) sued it over Netscape. RealNetworks (RNWK) sued it over its multimedia player. Even a little company called Burst sued the big software company over its audio and video server technology. Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) sued it over its use of audio software.

Now, Agere (AGR) is suing Microsoft over its use of certain VoIP intellectual property. Agere is being bought by LSI Logic for $3.5 billion. But, that is only a coincidence.

Agere was part of Bell Labs, the research arm of the old AT&T. Agere claims that Microsoft’s VoIP technology is partially based on work done by engineers at Bell Labs.

The suit comes at an difficult time for Microsoft. It has been trumpeting it ability to deliver VoIP to hundreds of thousands of businesses through its server architecture, news which probably makes the phone companies sweat.

Agere could try to prevent Microsoft from deploying its VoIP software.

But, all they may want is money.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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