Siemens holding one of the key patents in video codecs surprises me. I am not technically savvy, but I thought telecom infrastructure or direct media companies would hold the most important patents on this.
Siemens has acquired countless smaller businesses over the years, including some large ones (e.g. Mentor Graphics). It is entirely plausible to believe those purchases included IP such as this.
Siemens started as a communications company. The first invention was a type of telegraph. Siemens had a division called Siemens Communications Systems. They split that into Siemens Communications Systems (public networks) and Siemens Information Systems (PBX systems and such) in the mid 1980s.
The company did a reorg in the late 1990s into four divisions. Those were rail, industrial, power generation, and information & communications systems. That was again called Siemens Communications Systems.
SCS was rebranded to Unify in 2013. Unify was sold to Atos in 2016. Mitel bought it from Atos around 2023. Unify is currently still a subsidiary of Mitel. Parts of the communications division had been split off and went through separate M&A activity previously.
The DCO and EWSD were notable digital central office phone switches. The EWSD ended up at Nokia through some M&A activity. The EWSD was commissioned into phone company offices right up until 2017. When I was in the dial-up ISP world and had dozens of contacts within phone companies, the joke backronym for it was Europe’s Worst Switching Device. It was actually pretty reliable if the software was kept up to date, but there are hilarious stories about early models and unpatched installations. I have one of those stories in personal memory.
Fun facts: EWSD was a joint project in some way with Bosch, ran an operating system, and was one of the major projects in the world that used the CHILL programming language.
Most corporate companies have a (pointless?) 7-year cycle of "we need to diversificate" followed by a "we need to concentrate". That is/was also visible at at Siemens. As a result, the Siemens from now is quite different to the Siemens from 15 years ago.
That is true enough, but that wasn’t the question. This thread started with someone being surprised that Siemens would hold a patent suited to a telecoms company. The patent was issued years ago, hence it expiring.
Farming patents either via filing them or acquiring them was a big business move in the early 2000s. Even basic business on the internet felt like a patent minefield and there was constant debate about patent trolls and overreach.
It still happens to an extent, but we’ve gotten far enough to be in a place where basic patents have expired so that most basic companies don’t have to think about this stuff as much.
I do not miss the days of having to work with corporate counsel to try to determine if someone’s “system and method for data retrieval over the internet” patent could be construed to cover our basic REST API and then watching as they evaluated the likelihood of a lawsuit or if it was an empty threat designed to extract a settlement.
this is a partial misconception, at least in the US
the difference between then and now isn't that the patent law was majorly improved or that patent offices better apply the theoretic bars for quality, intuitiveness, etc. (actually many countries still measure their patent offices by nr. patents granted, setting very bad insensitives.)
the actual difference is a small number of concerns own such a shitload of "unreasonable" patents that they could more or less nuke the whole economy and decided its best for them to put them into a pool and not touch them
Almost true. "Siemens & Halske" startet like that (Halske being the mechanical expert).
By the time the company or it headquarter came to be known as "Siemens" it was already a "mixed bag" company --- we call it "Gemischtwarenladen". Quite early they made already made motors, generator ("dynamo maschine" 1868), insulated cables, locomotives (the worlds first electrical one was from them 1879), electric busses (1901). But also household appliances like stoves. Or automatic fuses and RCDs (Sentron) or industrial automation (Simatic).
Then it became an patent-poacher company, it was by decades no longer specialized in telecom. Yep, it still had PBX (private branch exchanges) and even the Gigaset mobile phones used to belong to Siemens. But that was dwarved by their other markets.
