‘Let us keep selling Word!’ — Microsoft
p2pnet news view | Products:- A week ago, following a lawsuit lodged by Canada’s i4i, Microsoft was ordered to stop selling its famous Word application.
Now it wants the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to let it to keep Word o the shelves, “as it fights an unfavorable patent ruling,” says the Associated Press.
It claims it and the public, “will both suffer if Word goes off the market while the company devises a workaround,” says the story.
The Toronto company won the permanent injunction and damages and interest totalling more than $290 million, said McKool Smith, the company`s US lawyers.
Microsoft infringed i4i patent US Patent No. 5,787,499 issued in 1998 to cover software designed to manipulate document architecture and content, said Toronto’s i4i, stating:
The software covered by the patent removed the need for individual, manually embedded command codes to control text formatting in electronic documents.
Judge Leonard Davis, ruled that Microsoft should pay i4i an additional $40 million for its willful infringement of the i4i patent, said company lawyers, adding:
Microsoft also was ordered to pay slightly more than $37 million in prejudgment interest, including an additional $21,102 per day until a final judgment is reached in the case. The court also ordered Microsoft to pay $144,060 per day until the date of final judgment for post-verdict damages. [The] permanent injunction 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.
Microsoft had 60 days to comply.
Microsoft has already been accused of infringing the patent.
So what, exactly, does ‘workaround’ mean?
Stay tuned.
ordered to stop selling – Stop selling Word, Microsoft ordered, August 12, 2009
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August 19th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
“It claims it and the public, âwill both suffer if Word goes off the market while the company devises a workaround,â
No it won’t, Open Office is there for the public.
Did MS forget about that?
August 19th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
“Micrsoft has already been accused of infringing the patent. So what, exactly, does âworkaroundâ mean?”
If they can find another implementation that doesn’t infringe on the patent, they can resume selling word. Or, if they could simply remove the infringing features.
On another note, xkcd has been one of my favorite comics for a while now.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/collections.png
August 19th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
@ EE
xkcd – Mine too. He’s great.
Cheers!
August 19th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
don’t you just love it when some little company pulls out a patent outta thin air and sues…
good old USA gotta love and hate it.
As for the openoffice post, openoffice is crap. plain and simple, has no features and will never match up to word or wordperfect in features and functionality.
August 19th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
@RW:
OpenOffice is not crap. If you think it needs something, features of bug fixes, then tell the developers! Or better yet, contribute yourself. You can, it’s open source! You can make it better.
If more people stopped complaining and started contributing to open source, more people would be happier with open source and finally see the limitations imposed by proprietary systems and how non-flexible and “feature forced” they are.
August 19th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Damn Robert… well said.
August 19th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Here’s an idea:
1) Take the OpenOffice source code
2) Modify it to your own liking and add the familiar Microsoft Office interface
3) Release it under the GPL so as to avoid a similar lawsuit
Problem solved!
August 19th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Open source projects have their problem too.
OpenOffice project in particular is extremely sick, that one must now think about its survival.
http://www.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ooo-commit-stats-2008.html
August 19th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
History of Calc solver is particularly sad
http://kohei.us/2007/10/02/history-of-calc-solver/
August 19th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Even so, the fact that it’s stayed around this long with the number of supporters that it has is certainly worth acknowledging. If a large software company with dozens of developers at their disposal were to invest their resources into it, it would be huge. Consumers would be happy, knowing that they could modify it to their liking and obtain patches from a variety of sources, and all it would cost the developers would be their completely obsolete copyright.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:16 am
“OpenOffice is not crap. If you think it needs something, features of bug fixes, then tell the developers! Or better yet, contribute yourself. You can, itâs open source! You can make it better.”
You say that as if every casual user has the knowledge and skill to re-write major portions of a complex piece of software…
August 20th, 2009 at 8:48 am
@RW:
The average user is more than capable of requesting features! “Can you add this? That? Word has this/that and I like those features”
Is that difficult? If casual user can complain about missing features then the casual user can submit ideas to the developers, as they clearly know what they want and OpenOffice doesn’t yet have!
Try asking Microsoft to add something you’d like to see in Office, you’ll have much better luck with OpenOffice and they’ll probably refer you to a “howto” page that explains the feature you think is missing is actually there, and how to use it.
August 20th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Robert:
Readers write is a proprietary-software fanboy, and more than likely paid by an ‘advocacy’ organization.
Don’t waste the time debating the relative merits. The ONLY thing you need to understand is that — whether ‘crappy’ or not, Openoffice can actually open older word documents that later versions of word can’t. Better backward-compatibility than Word itself is just inherently sad. (Of course, from M$ perspective it makes perfect sense, even if it DOES cause the de-facto standard to be incompatible to ITSELF, but as usual, incompatibility with previous versions are just an ‘externality’ that Microsoft doesn’t give a shit about.
OpenOffice actually solved the problem. Can’t tell you how many folks I know who downloaded OpenOffice JUST to be able to access their older word docs. Pretty sad when the ‘killer’ aspect is backward compatibility with a proprietary product, but you go on trolling, Y’hear?
(smirk)
August 21st, 2009 at 7:44 am
@Henry,
Thanks Henry! I am forced to use Office 2007/8 at work (Word/Excel/Outlook) and the default save is xlsx or docx and no backwards compatibility but worse, that stupid menu thing is REALLY annoying. And as per usual, they moved things around. “What? This is now under View? It was under Tools before and Edit before that”
The only benefit to Office is VBA because it integrates with the OS (Windoze) so easily and is VERY powerful. Sun’s StartOffice uses Java scripting (what a surprise) but it’s not as easy to pick up as VBA. I can’t remember OpenOffice’s macro ability, I tried it before but I just don’t remember.
But it’s amazing how 1997 was fine, 2003 started having some backwards issues once in a while with 1997, depending on the features, then 2007/8, yeah, what mess, fancy Microsoft banner on the top of the application but next to zero backwards compatibility without changing how things look.
August 21st, 2009 at 12:28 pm
“Openoffice can actually open older word documents that later versions of word canât…”
@Henry:
First of all, nothing I say here is with the intention of defending MS, or belittling OO.
(I feel I had to make that initial clarification.)
I’m still struggling to understand the statement about Word not opening older Word files.
Personally, I’ve used every version and have opened literally tens of thousands of Word documents over the years, and have never come across this difficulty you’re describing. I’ve always been able to open every single file, whether from one version behind or several versions behind.
Can you elaborate on the problem(s) you’re referring to?
Maybe I’m missing something (I know! As hard to believe as that might be! LOL)
August 21st, 2009 at 12:32 pm
@DA,
I have experienced issues with retaining formatting, opening was never an issue, but having everything look as it did before? That’s gone. So if you open a ‘97 Word (write letterz n’ shit yo) Doc in ‘08 Word, if you used formatting and such beyond the very basics, you encounter conflicts. By conflicts, I mean it screws up how things should look and you have to reformat it to make it look good again.
August 21st, 2009 at 12:33 pm
And Excel, same formatting issues.
August 22nd, 2009 at 7:32 pm
@Robert…
I’ve always found that 99% of these “formatting” issues were simply because of fonts used in the document that weren’t installed on the machine opening the document.
As we all (should) know by now, different fonts consume varying amounts of document space. Any substitution the software has to make for a missing font often “upsets” the format, even if the versions match, and whether or not you’re using Word or OpenOffice. Reformatting is a common necessity when reviving a variety of older documents. I never found it to be such a big deal that it would cause someone much angst, unless maybe the user’s working knowledge of the software is lacking.
But, even so, “won’t keep the original format” is not the same as “can’t open a document”, which is what I couldn’t get.