37,000 is a bit more than lots of patents. Nikola Tesla had around 300, presumably all his own inventions, and Thomas Edison had just over 1000 (US) from his own work and his employee's work. Those set an upper limit on what geniuses can produce in a lifetime for pre-IT Industry patents. (eg: before patents got out of hand.)
Does Ericsson employ the equivalent of 1000 Teslas? That seems unlikely, so I'm guessing many of their patents are relatively trivial or vaguely generic. Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to produce so many of them.
On a practical note, how can Ericsson make use of a patent library that large? I don't mean licensing, I mean how do their engineers make use of the existing patents to create new inventions and products? It must be as bad as software developers trying to use a huge standard library (like .NET) which I guess I find surprising.
Well, for a 139 years old company, with today some 118k employees, working on products with technology as their primary added value (as opposed to Apple which can be expected to spend a lot of its energy on design, user design and industrial design etc etc while not really inventing that much new foundational technology, in comparison) ...
Ericsson has well over 100,000 employees, has been around for 139 years and has acquired many other firms and their patents. 37,000 patents doesn't sound excessive.
Machines are a lot more complicated these days and I'm sure if Tesla and Edison were around these days they would file for a lot more patents too.
Does Ericsson employ the equivalent of 1000 Teslas? That seems unlikely, so I'm guessing many of their patents are relatively trivial or vaguely generic. Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to produce so many of them.
On a practical note, how can Ericsson make use of a patent library that large? I don't mean licensing, I mean how do their engineers make use of the existing patents to create new inventions and products? It must be as bad as software developers trying to use a huge standard library (like .NET) which I guess I find surprising.