Microsoft Corp may have little alternative but to buy Wang Laboratories Inc outright, Infoworld columnist Robert Cringely believes. He says that Wang filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft some time back claiming that Object Linking & Embedding infringes patents Wang was awarded for the 24X imaging workstation it developed but never launched as a product. Pointing out that DoubleSpace, hardly a crucial piece of code for Microsoft, was seen to be worth over $100m to Stac Electronics Inc, he suggests that the patents at issue here would be worth billions, so that buying Wang, even if it simply threw the rest away rather than selling on what it didn’t want, would be the cheapest option for Microsoft to protect a core new technology.