In a classic case of Texas vs. Borg, a judge actually ruled against the beast that is Microsoft, ruling that they can’t sell Word software that uses the XML file formats, namely DOCX, XML, and DOCM.
Judge Leonard Davis ruled that Microsoft had violated patents owned by i4i, inc, in the way they opened and interpreted custom XML files. The punishment? To stop selling MS Word in the United States after the injunction becomes effective in 60 days. Ouch.
To add insult to injury, Microsoft is supposed to pay i4i $290 million in damages. However, $300 million is peanuts compared to what Microsoft would lose if they couldn’t sell Word, as Office displaced Windows as Microsoft’s primary revenue driver a while back. You can bet they are going to fight back, and fight back hard. Read the full story here.
(via seattlepi.com)
Jamie
August 13, 2009 at 10:22am
with having proprietary formats. If MSFT would pull their heads out of their collective behinds and support open standards, this wouldn't be an issue. They seem to be changing their tack with IE (since Safari and Firefox started punching them in the butter), hopefully Office will be next. I'll bet at some point in the future, if it's still around, Office will be web based anyway, and therefore standards compliant. What can you say? They have just spent way too much time co-opting and not nearly enough time innovating. If they let the standards be standards and focused instead on innovating user experience, there'd be no ruling.
kevkevallen
August 13, 2009 at 1:11am
I don't like Microsoft just as much as the next Mac user but I use the Office suite almost every day!
Every Microsoft Office document I have is in the newest XML formats!
So what next? The next version of Word doesn't have the XML formats? Will they still read the XML formats that I already have saved, or will I have to save everything as a .doc and rich text?
