Re:talkback (Score 1)

NB: I'm one of the two inventors of Talkback (aka the Netscape Quality Feedback Agent).

But the key thing is that Netscape's error reporting only occurred in the case of a fatal crash, whereas Microsoft's patent covers non-fatal program failures as well.

Talkback catches crashes by default, with the programmer having to do very little. That is part of its base level functionality.

Talkback ALSO reports on any other error (or non-error) condition the developer cares about. It's easy, and common practice, to put a call to Talkback in an exception handler, for example.

There's even a mode that will cause Talkback to report to the server the first time the application is used. This makes it very useful to compare the number of downloads to the number of people who actually install it and run it at least once.

So even Microsoft's "unique" addition of responding to non-fatal errors still falls short of what Talkback-enabled products could do in 1997.