That will only work for toy inventions. It takes 3 to 5 years to simply build a 1.0 product. By the time the product is out the door, you have only 2 to 4 years to make any profit.

If you need 3 to 5 years to build a 1.0 product and 2 to 4 to profit from it, you don't need patents at all. Just keep it in secret till you develop the product and start selling. By the time the competition starts selling your product, you'll have a several years advantage.

Lots of programs raise a DLL missing error if you need a specific version, or needs .NET runtime 2.5 and 2.0 is installed. If errors arise, there are probelms in any OS.

Here in Spain, about 20 years ago there was a de-facto monopoly in games distribution. That company (ERBE) decided to lower their prices from 2000Ptas to 875 (20$ to 8.75$) and raised the sales about an order of magnitude. And that was when games came on audio tapes. Right now, if a company big enough makes a similar move, I think they could multiply their sales and profits.