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Trying to figure out what a big company is going to do by reading its patents is like trying to figure out what a man is going to do by studying an alphabetized list of all the individual words he's spoken in the last fourteen years.

Which is to say: It's not an entirely useless activity -- if I've never said or written the word Erlang in my life there's a good chance that I won't publish any Erlang code within the next week -- but just because someone thinks or talks about something does not make it so. Nor can you necessarily figure out how the pieces go together by studying them all separately.