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Nuance sues TellMe
Friday - February 24, 2006 02:57 PM in
A few days ago this crossed my electronic desktop: Nuance Files Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against TellMe Networks Inc.
Patent disputes are nothing unusual in technology, but TellMe is a longtime customer of Nuance; or at least of the part of Nuance that was Nuance before ScanSoft bought Nuance and renamed itself.
Normally you don't go around suing your own customers, not if you want to keep them as customers.
In addition, when you buy technology such as speech recognition engines, the contract always includes a provision that grants the buyer (TellMe) a license to the seller's patents. I find it hard to believe that TellMe's lawyers would have overlooked this little detail. Of course, that contract was between TellMe and the old Nuance, which is just a piece of the new Nuance.
So I think there must be more going on here than meets the eye. Part of the dynamic has to be the fact that Nuance is now a de-facto monopoly for telephony-grade speech engines. That means that TellMe doesn't have the option of taking its business elsewhere if its relationship with Nuance sours.
What's the real story? It could be that Nuance tried to use its newfound market dominance to extract better terms from TellMe.
Or it could be that Nuance is making a boneheaded move to try to capture TellMe's VUI design business by driving TellMe's customers away.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall of some of those discussions!
Posted by Peter Leppik
Normally you don't go around suing your own customers, not if you want to keep them as customers.
In addition, when you buy technology such as speech recognition engines, the contract always includes a provision that grants the buyer (TellMe) a license to the seller's patents. I find it hard to believe that TellMe's lawyers would have overlooked this little detail. Of course, that contract was between TellMe and the old Nuance, which is just a piece of the new Nuance.
So I think there must be more going on here than meets the eye. Part of the dynamic has to be the fact that Nuance is now a de-facto monopoly for telephony-grade speech engines. That means that TellMe doesn't have the option of taking its business elsewhere if its relationship with Nuance sours.
What's the real story? It could be that Nuance tried to use its newfound market dominance to extract better terms from TellMe.
Or it could be that Nuance is making a boneheaded move to try to capture TellMe's VUI design business by driving TellMe's customers away.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall of some of those discussions!
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 02:57 PM by | | | |