August 17, 2009

Federal Court Orders Microsoft to Stop Selling Word

Microsoft Office A Texas federal court’s ruling last week that forbids Microsoft from selling new copies of Word 2003 and Word 2007 will have little impact on you and me. Technically the order restricts Microsoft from selling (or supporting) any “any infringing and Future Word Products that have the capability of opening a .XML, .DOCX or .DOCM file (”an XML file”) containing custom XML.” It is the “custom XML” language that makes the ruling unimportant for most people. You can learn more about XML here.

[Update 9/5/09. The District Court order was stayed on 9/3 in a per curiam decision by the Court of Appeals.]

Microsoft may continue to support products bought before the injunction becomes effective (60 days after the August 11, 2009 ruling.

A jury in May decided that Microsoft violated a patent dealing with XML files. Damages and interest awarded against Microsoft total over $277 million. Microsoft says it will appeal the ruling.

The question now is whether i4i Inc, the private Canadian company that holds U.S. Patent 5,787,449, will go against OpenOffice and other Open Document software that uses XML technology. Or will companies use code workarounds to avoid the impact of the ruling? Or will they license the technology from i4i? Microsoft was issued a patent (7,571,169) on August 4 that could provide Microsoft a way to avoid i4i’s patent.

For interesting background on i4i and why it filed the lawsuit against Microsoft, read Fabrice Taylor’s story. See a copy of the injunction and the final judgment order here.

What are XML files?

Jared Newman, in a PC World blog, explains it this way:

Think of XML as a way to define what kind of information goes into a document. So, as I’m writing this story in Word, I could hypothetically use XML to denote the story’s title as “headline,” my name as “byline,” and the article itself as the “body.”

Now, PC World might be interested in having my article marked up like this for a variety of reasons. The most basic purpose would be to store information on my work in a database, so they could easily determine how many articles I’ve written. But where XML really gets useful is in its ability to edit the documents themselves and create new ones.

So, let’s say PC World wanted to publish a book containing all the blogs posted on the Web site this year. Provided that every Word document was marked up with the appropriate XML tags, PC World could use a script to format all the documents in the same way, with headlines in a certain size, bylines in bold, and text in a specific font. If I tagged the subject of the article with XML, it’d even be possible to create a new document containing all the writing I’ve done on that particular subject.

Final Thoughts

What does this mean for you? Nothing – for now. You may continue to use Word 2003 and Word 2007. Most users don’t use custom XML and won’t feel any impact from this ruling. If Microsoft does make any changes, it’s unlikely you’ll even notice.

Your thoughts?

Walt