I have decided to a category of “Douchbags” for those people who deserve the title. First up: some twits at Microsoft who filed for a patent for “sparklines”. Sparklines are small graphics and the Wiki page describes them well. These people at Microsoft filed for a patent on this:
- Samuel Chow Radakovitz, (Redmond, WA, US)
- Adam Michael Buerman, (Bellevue, WA, US)
- Anupam Garg, (Redmond, WA, US)
- Matthew John Androski, (Bellevue, WA, US)
- Matthew Kevin Becker, (Kirkland, WA, US)
- Brian S. Ruble, (Bellevue, WA, US)
Sparklines were invented by Edward Tufte. Like was posted on an MSDN blog:
For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”, as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence. Sparklines help bring meaning and context to numbers being reported and, unlike a chart, are meant to be embedded into what they are describing.
Douchebags.