...while the patent may well have been accidental (given the response, it was obviously an error, even if it was done on purpose), it does reveal a "patent everything" mentality inside of MS. The bad thing for MS is that incidents like this one are bound to cause MS' other patents to get a lot more scrutiny (that would be good for the computing industry at large).
That said, Bill, Steve, and company aren't stupid (unscrupulous yes, but definitely not stupid), know everything I just wrote much better than I do, and are highly likely to put controls into place to prevent similar "errors" from occurring in the future. We'll see how effective they are in due course.
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