[brador]

Now think about how often the patent system has stifled and stalled and delayed advancement for decades per innovation at a time.

Where would we be if patents never existed?

[sarchertech]

Who knows? If we’d never moved on from trade secrets to patents, we might be a hundred years behind.

[user_7832]

Is that really the case in the last few years/decades?

My understanding is that any company that can (read: has enough money for good lawyers), will prefer to use trade secrets for a combination of reasons, a big one being that competitors cannot use that technology after 10 years/when the patent expires.

Admittedly this was from my entrepreneurship classes in a European uni, so I'm not sure how it is in different places in the world.

[cma]

To be fair, Google has a patent on the transformer architecture. Their page rank patent monopoly probably helped fund the R&D.

[dboreham]

They also had a patent on map/reduce.