It easy to see how this patent application can actually come to life:
At the end of every sprint or dev milestone, an email goes out from some PM or dev manager, asking people for "ideas to be patented." Somebody then collects all of these ideas. Because applications cost money and units have budgets, then there is a preliminary amount of "filtering": ideas that are "cool," the latest shiny feature (who cares if it has been developed elsewhere for ages), etc. This goes from things like tiles for UI to really deep advancements in cloud computing. The specs are a source of leads. Obviously in many cases the list includes a bunch of relatively minor advances (since a lot of development at MS is mostly incremental) that may be prior art except to the junior dev and PM who think they just discovered how to square the circle. There may be some preferential treatment here for patents to special people, given that there is a little bit of money that, if approved, goes back to the employees too. There is a column in some spreadsheet that classifies the patent ideas based on their perceived awesomeness.
At some point the list of patents has to be sent to some IP lawyer. The IP lawyer does real work here, but is also looking at thing like competitive aspects the team might have missed: i.e. if it is in an important business area, then it gets an extra boost to become an application. An exec probably approves the list too.
When the list is approved for applications, the job is then to make sure the application is written by the members of the team and the lawyers. This takes a lot of time and a lot of work, but since the specs already exist, people use that as the basis.
When you get a patent application granted, you get a little plaque which you hang on your wall and/or a little cube you stack on your desk. The higher the stack the more your patent prowess. Given how some people have been at the company for long, they can accumulate 20+ of these cubes. You get an aura of inventor.
Obviously, people find that it is beneficial to get a patent (the plaque, the cube, the little cash), and would lobby for these ideas to be in the approved set, or at least to participate in the shiny specs because the rule is that everybody who was even remotely involved in the patent gets to be listed in it (therefore, managers get a lot of patents because they were in meetings where the idea was discussed and maybe contributed to it).
At the end of every sprint or dev milestone, an email goes out from some PM or dev manager, asking people for "ideas to be patented." Somebody then collects all of these ideas. Because applications cost money and units have budgets, then there is a preliminary amount of "filtering": ideas that are "cool," the latest shiny feature (who cares if it has been developed elsewhere for ages), etc. This goes from things like tiles for UI to really deep advancements in cloud computing. The specs are a source of leads. Obviously in many cases the list includes a bunch of relatively minor advances (since a lot of development at MS is mostly incremental) that may be prior art except to the junior dev and PM who think they just discovered how to square the circle. There may be some preferential treatment here for patents to special people, given that there is a little bit of money that, if approved, goes back to the employees too. There is a column in some spreadsheet that classifies the patent ideas based on their perceived awesomeness.
At some point the list of patents has to be sent to some IP lawyer. The IP lawyer does real work here, but is also looking at thing like competitive aspects the team might have missed: i.e. if it is in an important business area, then it gets an extra boost to become an application. An exec probably approves the list too.
When the list is approved for applications, the job is then to make sure the application is written by the members of the team and the lawyers. This takes a lot of time and a lot of work, but since the specs already exist, people use that as the basis.
When you get a patent application granted, you get a little plaque which you hang on your wall and/or a little cube you stack on your desk. The higher the stack the more your patent prowess. Given how some people have been at the company for long, they can accumulate 20+ of these cubes. You get an aura of inventor.
Obviously, people find that it is beneficial to get a patent (the plaque, the cube, the little cash), and would lobby for these ideas to be in the approved set, or at least to participate in the shiny specs because the rule is that everybody who was even remotely involved in the patent gets to be listed in it (therefore, managers get a lot of patents because they were in meetings where the idea was discussed and maybe contributed to it).