Many people in the technology startup community have very high regards for Paul Graham and Y Combinator, the exclusive seed accelerator program in Silicon Valley which has under its belt acclaimed successes like reddit, Airbnb and Dropbox. There’s equal standing for Andreessen Horowitz, a private equity investment company with notable alumni such as Groupon, Instagram and Skype.

Now those people and companies have put their most valuable support – money, experience and brand – behind “InstallMonetizer“, a company that describes itself as a “windows based software monetization platform”. Very carefully selected words.

Consumers Receiving Product Recommendations- We review the consumer’s pc for existing software. This is done to provide the consumer an advertiser software which they currently do not have installed on their computer. This information is not stored in order to maintain consumer’s privacy. We gather personally identifiable and may include information regarding your geo-location, ip address, operating system, language setting and information regarding whether recommended advertiser software has been accepted, downloaded, installed and any reason for failure installing. None of his information is personally identifiable.

We endeavor to take security measures to guard against unauthorized access to the systems where we store your data. This includes internal reviews of our data collection, storage, and processing practices and security measures and physical security measures.

I’m not going to delve into the technical aspects of crapware – its effects on system performance, reliability and satisfaction are pretty well documented. The fact that there is a thriving ecosystem of “crapware, adware, spyware” removers is enough evidence it’s a significant issue.

Perhaps more importantly, I strongly believe crapware installers among other foul practices have eroded the trust of the Windows app ecosystem as a whole.

What used to be a fairly standard flow of app discovery has turned into a minefield of misleading download links on websites, defaulted checkboxes or sneaky install crapware buttons in position of “next” in wizards and browser homepage overrides. And it just takes one wrong click to have irreversible consequences.

Last but not least, disregarding the moral factor of this investment, I’m puzzled why such visionary investors would invest in a process that is slowly being phased out by changing industry practices...

I admit every person and company has the right to set their own moral compass, but it’s genuinely disappointing to see such respected and influential people and companies put their weight behind a practice that has undermined and continues to undermine the credibility of the Windows app ecosystem.

Odom thoroughly searched the prior art before asserting his tool groups patent. He's filed accelerated examination (AE) continuations. AE requires a fairly exhaustive search of the prior art, and identification of how the claims are supported in the specification, as well as mapping the closest prior art to the claims.

Odom filed '592 in late 2000. Seven years later active tool groups burst into the commercial marketplace, introduced, and actively promoted, by Microsoft. It has spread like wildfire as a new user interface standard. Belated infringement coupled with commercial success is itself an indicator of non-obviousness.

As an aside, punters, who have commented that Odom's claims are Bilskied out, don't know what they are talking about. The CAFC has been concerned about overreaching business method patents. Bilski required, for software patents, that claims transform the subject matter, and have tangibility (according to one interpretation), i.e., representational of non-computer existence. Odom's tool groups are like containers in a toolbox, and his claims alter the condition of those groups.

However, the court held that the asserted claims presented “one of the clearest” cases of obviousness that had come before it because Odom had simply “cob-bled together various pieces of what was already out there in a manner . . . that would have been obvious to anyone skilled in the art at the time of the invention.”

Those same concepts are claimed in the ’592 patent except that the groups of tools are on a single toolbar. That is an insignificant advance over Kavalam. KSR Int’l Co., 550 U.S. at 417 (“If a person of ordinary skill can implement a predictable variation [of a prior art work], § 103 likely bars its patentability.”). Kavalam explains that although its invention has been described in the context of a web browser, employing collections of buttons and toolbars that are relevant to that application, a person of skill in the art would appreciate that the inven-tion can be adopted to other applications where a different arrangement or combination of tools may be desired. Kavalam, col.15, l.63–col.16, l.12. The district court thus did not err in determining that the manner in which ’592 patent divides up toolbars into groups and claims manipu-lation of tool groups would have been a common sense variation of Kavalam for a person of skill in the art. Likewise, it would have also been a trivial change for a person of skill in the art designing such alterable tool groups to add an indicator that could indicate any altered condition of the tool group.