Any change in supplier or design would be "a pretty significant challenge, " the person said, requiring layers of modification from hardware to controllingsoftware to adjust for a new battery.
The Supreme Court first upheld a software patent in 1981, involving softwarecontrolling a process for curing rubber, and since then patents have become a vital bulwark protecting the assets of big companies like IBM and Microsoft.
But Tesla has shown the route to making electric cars not just mainstream but superior to their fossil fueled counterparts by emulating Apple and controlling the hardware, software and network.
Traditionally, much of the intelligence for controlling data communications is spread around a network, managed by proprietary software that comes with each vendor's gear.
Scientific-Atlanta and Motorola locked up the box market by controlling--in the name of antipiracy--the encoding software that scrambles a video signal at the cable company's hub and descrambles it at the home.
Isn't it these same men who run the world, most of the time, controlling everything from its wars to its governments to its corporations to its software?
Digital storage hardware and software will play an important role in providing the level of services and performance that consumers are expecting while controlling both the cost and energy use of the required data centers.