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.
