"Patriotism," said Samuel Johnson, "is the last refuge of a scoundrel." In software, it seems, despair more often takes the form of lawsuits, and, in particular, intellectual property claims of the most dubious variety. If your market share keeps slipping, and you`ve lost the ability to innovate your way back to victory, Plan B is to sue your competitors. When you can`t win through innovation, in other words, try litigation.

So far, thank goodness, this strategy has never worked. In fact, a review of some of the most famous cases in the rather dismal corpus of software-related lawsuits suggests just the opposite: that bringing such lawsuits may further distract companies from the business of serving their customers, hastening their fall from grace.

Three cases from the early 1990s amply demonstrate the futility of using the courts to regain a lost lead: