In the closing days of February, Microsoft announced that it had filed suit against navigation device maker, TomTom, for violation of certain patents (I’m a bit late – I just found out last week).  There has been much speculation since about why they are taking this action at this particular point in time.  DirectionsMag did a podcast on the subject last week.  Joe and Adena suggested that motivations might include:  a) a bid to make a low-cost takeover of TomTom, which is heavily burdened with debt from its acquisition of TeleAtlas; b) an initial shot at leveraging its huge patent portfolio.  The open source world has been particularly fixated on the latter possibility, with Slashdotters quickly suggesting that this was an opening salvo directed at Linux by the newly elevated corporate vice president, Horacio Gutierrez.  While Linux is not named in the Microsoft filing, some of the patents in question involve file access protocols in TomTom devices that use the Linux kernel.  Microsoft denies that any open source software is the target, but I can see why the move would make the OS community nervous.

However, in a conversation with Russ Nelson at yesterday’s Philly OpenStreetMap meetup, I made the following suggestion that I’ll summarize here.  Last September, Google announced that it has moved to exclusively using TeleAtlas street data for all of its online map products.  This had already been the case in the GoogleMaps API, but autumn saw the Navteq data was dropped from the browser tools and mobile products as well (probably due to the acquisition of Navteq by Nokia).  I’m wondering if the target of Microsoft’s patent move is not TomTom itself but rather the TeleAtlas unit, which would give it a global street database as well as leverage over Google and many other enterprises.  If this turns out to be the case, I would speculate that we will likely see greatly increased attention to OpenStreetMap from many directions and perhaps a major investment in the project by Google and others.

Or, perhaps a cigar is just a cigar, and MS is simply going after TomTom because it’s a large commercial firm infringing on its file system and navigation patents.  Given the customary speed of patent suits, it may be a while before we know.