Posted on 08/12/2009 8:43:04 AM PDT by ShadowAce
A judge on Tuesday ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word, one of its premier products, in its current form due to patent infringement.
Judge Leonard Davis of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued a permanent injunction that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML", according to a statement released by attorneys for the plantiff, i4i.
Microsoft did not immediately reply to request for comment but said in a statement that it planned to appeal the verdict.
Toronto-based i4i sued Microsoft in March 2007 alleging that the software giant violated its 1998 patent (No 5,787,449) for a document system that eliminated the need for manually embedded formatting codes.
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is considered a "page description language", with one of its key qualities being that it is readable by people, not just machines. Unlike HTML, which has predefined tags, XML allows developers and users to define their own tags for data, such as price and product.
In May, a federal jury in Tyler, Texas, ruled that the custom XML tagging features of Word 2003 and Word 2007 infringed on i4i's patent and ordered Microsoft to pay $200m (£120m) in the case.
In Tuesday's ruling, Microsoft was also ordered to pay an additional $40m for willful infringement, as well as $37m in pre-judgement interest. The order requires Microsoft to comply with the injunction within 60 days and forbids Microsoft from testing, demonstrating or marketing Word products containing the contested XML feature.
Wrong!
I downloaded the free Open Office suite for my own notebook. Works fine for me.
IIRC Time to Execute for Office 2007 is faster than any other office suite, don’t know why you have issues. Of course you could still be running a last century pc for all I know.
XML has been around for a while, but Word’s use of it in document files is new in Word 2007.
No it isn’t.
My god you people are full of your hyperbole. The exact same functionality is there between versions, right down to shortcut keys, time to execute is faster than any other office suite and there are more features.
The biggest complaint are the people who have learning disabilities and can’t figure out how to use the ribbon interface.
2. In order for the injunction to stand, i4i must demonstrate “irreparable harm” if Microsoft continues to sell Word. But there is no such irreparable harm, since the courts can simply factor-in additional amounts Microsoft must pay should they eventually lose the appeal.
3. There is a pretty high probability that the i4i patent will (eventually) be invalidated.
4.Even if you add up the $200 million from the original verdict plus the additional damages the judge tacked on, for Microsoft that's still less than a week's worth of profit. If Microsoft think they're going to lose the appeal, Microsoft will just license the technology for say $100 mil (sorry, “an undisclosed amount”) which i4i will happily take.
And they removed a number of the features from 2003. They were so interested in catering to the lowest common denominator, they made a product that really sucks for any type of power user.
(Oh, and Apple mostly uses a proprietary hardware model.)
BTW, why is Apple, originally a hardware company that does makes most of its money on computers, mp3 players, G3 phones, and now the fifth largest music retailer in the U.S. the foil for Microsoft, as software house? My snipe at the proprietary software model was shot from the UNIX/Linux open-source camp.
WTF you blathering on about?
I use Office 2007 every single day. It's one of the most useable, most productive pieces of software out there. That's why it's one of the highest selling software packages on the planet, even at retail.
Where do you Microosft-hating Apple crazies come up with this stuff anyways?
Microsoft Tourette's
Amen for Word Perfect! Still use it.
parsy, who can’t figure out Word on a lot of things
What, pray tell, did they remove?
I can guarantee you they added far more than they removed.
It’s called group think.
They are saying what they think the group wants to hear.
Yes!! WordPerfect will always be the best. We all got sucked in to Word when Gates was pre-installing that crap in new computers and I’ll never forgive Gates for that. MS Word is like a toy word processor compared with WP.
No kidding. In college (mid-90s) I used WordPerfect and it was very user-friendly. I remember formatting page numbers (e.g., on documents with multiple sections) as one of the things that WordPerfect did intuitively while getting MS Word to do it was like pulling teeth.
I love Excel 2007.
Has a million rows instead of 65,000, and I can now fit whole pages of text into a single cell, and format it better (my office uses Excel inappropriately, as you can probably tell, but at least MicroSoft is making it easier for us to do so!).
I like Word 2007 too, and Outlook 2007—all of it is an improvement over what I had before (2000 I think).
Good Grief!!! What kind of insanity is this?
I want a patent for the lower-case "e". I demand it.
IDIOTS! XML is a 50-year-old protocol. It is in general public use.
Do you honestly believe anyone that is critical of MS is an “Apple crazy”? FWIW, if he were an “Apple crazy” he would probably be using Office 2008 not 2007, which actually isn’t as usable as 2004 because they removed support for VBA.
The first office suite I ever owned was Borlands, which came with WordPerfect. The prepackaged Word for Windows couldn’t compete in what it could do. However Word for Windows was meant for those who didn’t need or want to spend money on something so basic as a word processor. The fact is though that Corel couldn’t compete feature for feature against the full office suite that MS offered.
If it makes you feel better why don’t you go and purchase Word Perfect, you know they still make it under the Corel name brand.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.