[Rebel_Ace]

No doubt IBM is a “Patent Monster”, and your points are all well taken. I have no favorite dog in this hunt. It was just that the poster Henry Hnyellar threw down the “look it up”challenge, so l did.

[Vince Ferrer]

I'm not criticizing you in particular. I just wanted to point out that Google, Apple, or Microsoft, are not really great patent wise. They do work relating to their current business, and that is ok of course. IBM, for comparison, does a lot of fundamental research which Apple and Google don't do.

IBM written in Xenon atoms.

People think Apple is a world beater and will stay forever, but I can think of one area that they are critically lacking, and that is in the big data/ analytics/ cloud side. That is the current "next big thing," and they are not a big player in it. They even had to team with IBM to get a big data health care application. If anything on the horizon will kill Apple, it will be that it is not the owner of a lot of big data sets, except maybe what their Apple Pay app generates.