Florian Müller – expert on the subject of software patents – on the election of the Philips-patent to be the "software patent of March":

Some might call this is a trivial patent, but from the perspective of patent law, it's not. It may very well be true that when the application was filed in 1987, every menu on a computer like the Apple Macintosh had a fixed location and consumed space on the screen even when it wasn't needed. The idea of a pop-up context menu was new.

Also, this example demonstrates how someone can take out a patent on the basis of a very general description of an idea, and someone who reads the patent document is only 1% closer to actually writing a program that implements a context menu than someone who doesn't. It monopolizes the right to solve a problem instead of providing an actual solution because it describes the solution so vaguely that it's only an extended description of the task at hand.