Your fave inventor's company prefers to file hundreds of patents in lieu of producing/marketing products. His hopes are that at some future point in time another company will take all the risks to produce and market a consumer good/product that directly/indirectly infringes on a patent. Then a potential unrealized gain may be made by selling the patents and/or threatening legal actions for patent right infringements. It's an innovative business approach, indeed.
I think it's misguided to imply that Dyson are typically of this type of behaviour. To my knowledge, they haven't sold the rights of any of their patents, nor do they have any current licensing arrangements in place with anybody else. They have filed a large number of patents in their short history - they even have their own dedicated in-house IP department. But, like any similar technology company, only a proportion of what they patent will make it in to final products.
For example, one patent they have from a few years ago is a cable management system, so that a robot cleaner can clean a room while getting its power from a wall socket. Their method looks good and from the reference sources they're not the only major company who have been investigating this possibility. Presumably, this type of method has yet to make it to market (by anyone) for one of the following reasons :-
1) It doesn't work well enough in practise.
2) It is believed this feature wouldn't be perceived favourably by the consumer.
3) It's not worth taking any further. They've progressed with an alterative method that works better.
4) Recent advances in battery technology will quickly make it redundant.
But, of course, there's no real incentive to not file a patent. Advances in other product areas could make a valid business case at a future date and it prevents any competitor making a claim in the meantime which would invalid the claims.
There are a large number of opportunists purely in business to file patent with no desire at all to ever manufacture a product themselves and simply make as much money as possible by holding the big players to ransom. Partially with software patents, towards which the US parent system is very favourable, unfortunately). These people are the scum of the earth in my view.
In my view, what Dyson does is above board, ethical and exactly the same as any company of the same profile. Please feel free to prove otherwise if you disagree.
