Some explanation has emerged for the peculiar behaviour of Rambus over the years. It seems the company’s hyper-active approach to litigating with its customer-base derived from a group of activist investors.
It always seemed odd that Rambus, founded by two super-techies Mark Horovitz and Mike Farmwald, should have first invented some superb memory interfaces, and then elected to piss off much of the memory industry by demanding higher than usual licensing fees, and suing those companies which declined to take a licence.
In the normally collegiate atmosphere of semiconductor industry give-and-take on licensing, these things are done by mutual agreement.
Rambus, if it had charged reasonable royalties and licence fees, could have had a respected business with a solidly, lucrative revenue stream almost ad infinitum.
Instead, Rambus was so aggressive in its demands that it stirred up large parts of the memory industry to fight back, and seek to invalidate the Rambus patents. There followed years of miserable and costly litigation.
It’s always been a mystery how this deplorable state of affairs could have arisen, but now it appears from revelations by two Rambus investors, Doug and James Kelley, that Rambus has a unique set of investors which have urged the company to bring these lawsuits against memory manufacturers.
It shows how stupid greed can be. The poor old goose got strangled just because she wouldn’t lay more than one golden egg at a time.
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