MicrosStrategy Files Patent Lawsuit Against Rival One Day Before Merger Complete

from the nice-timing dept

theodp writes "Alleging that Crystal Decisions willfully infringes on its patents for asynchronous control of report generation using a web browser, management of an automatic OLAP report broadcast system, and providing business intelligence web content with reduced client-side processing, MicroStrategy has filed a lawsuit seeking treble damages, attorneys' fees, and an injunction preventing Crystal from making, using, or selling Crystal Reports. The lawsuit comes just a day before an $800 million merger of Crystal Decisions and MicroStrategy rival Business Objects is supposed to close, and only a week after MicroStrategy was granted one of the patents in question."

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    Chris Maresca, 11 Dec 2003 @ 12:07pm

    Prior art...

    I actually wrote a system in 1995 that did precisely what is described in the patent. We had a query engine accessed through a web browser. It used natural language queries and would basically write a custom "query engine" for each query.

    Because the queries took so long to run (the DB was huge and we couln't hold the browser connection open for more than 3 minutes...), the results were email back to the user, along with a hyperlink to the results.

    The system was smart enough to cache queries so that duplicates were not run, you would simply be linked through to the report.
    Sounds like the same thing, and I'm pretty sure I still have the code for it somewhere.

    Chris.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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