Patent spat forces businesses to upgrade Office

CNet News ^ | 30 January 2006 | Ina Fried

[ShadowAce]

[tx_eggman]

Microsoft, where quality is job 1.3

[bikepacker67]

I love this:

"It was recently decided in a court of law that certain portions of code found in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, Microsoft Office Access 2003, Microsoft Office XP Professional and Microsoft Access 2002 infringe a third-party patent," Microsoft said in an e-mail to customers. "As a result, Microsoft must make available a revised version of these products with the allegedly infringing code replaced."

Allegedly?
What part of "decided in a court of law" does MS not understand?

[PastorBooks]

Solution:

www.openoffice.org

[Manfred the Wonder Dawg]

Indeed! Thanks for pointing this out. My college freshman offspring told me she needed Powerpoint(less) for her design class. I pointed her to OpenOffice.org and she loves it! and I love the price.

[antiRepublicrat]

Software patents suck, even when it's Microsoft that gets hit by them.

[upchuck]

Heh. Not a problem for those of us running good old reliable Office 2000. It does way more than I'll ever need.

Wanna bet MicroSloth jiggers Vista so the older versions of Office won't run?

Solution, as suggested above, openoffice.org.

[N3WBI3]

I don't know if its so much that software patents or its how they are applied.. If someone does something *really new* that nobody has ever though of (in any way) before a patent is ok. But those occasions are *REALLY* rare and this was clearly not one of them.

[George Smiley]

Google "PowerPoint is Evil".

It's a real Wired magazine article which explains why.

[Manfred the Wonder Dawg]

Good article, but I think the point is actually that man is evil, and PowerPoint(less) is a tool that facilitates the mind-numbing, pointless presentations so many corporate drones make - and they READ EVERY SLIDE to the audience. This is why most US companies do not allow employees to carry weapons in the work place :-)

[proxy_user]

Civil cases are decided by the preponderance of the evidence.

You are still entitled to go around saying the court got it wrong, if you like. You just have to pay the judgement.

[Golden Eagle]

How am I required to upgrade? I'm indemnified (protected) with what I have, so the upgrade is completely optional, it appears. Recommended, but optional.

Now, if this was open source code, which typically includes no warranty and passes legal liability on to the end users, then yes, you would be required to upgrade to avoid any personal legal liability for using the product.

[doc30]

It will really suck at my company. We have a lot of applications that are not compatible with XP Service pack 2. It is explicitly forbidden to upgrade our systems to SP2 for this reason. Wonder what management will do?

[George Smiley]

That's the real reason that games for the Palm Pilot were invented.

: ^ ) : ^ ) : ^ )

[antiRepublicrat]

Us defending Microsoft might really mess with B2K and GE. But then this stuff happens when you go on principle rather than just support a specific company.

[antiRepublicrat]

Now, if this was open source code, which typically includes no warranty and passes legal liability on to the end users,

Lay conjecture, never tested in court.

[antiRepublicrat]

Good article, but I think the point is actually that man is evil, and PowerPoint(less) is a tool that facilitates the mind-numbing, pointless presentations so many corporate drones make

Here is a good example of why Apple's presentations are great and Microsoft's "Death by Powerpoint" presentations are so lame.

[N3WBI3]

meh, it will be spun or ignored like it always is...

[PAR35]

Not a problem for those of us running good old reliable Office 2000.

What does it do that my Office97 won't?