Microsoft Pays $290m

Remember this one? Well, the supreme court ruled that Microsoft did use some code illegally, and needs to cough up $290 million in favor to i4i.

They (i4i) must be celebrating somewhere in the tropics by now I imagine.... $290m is something I don't carry around in my wallet every day.

The court also decided that the existing Office/Word installments in the world don't need the patented code removed. New purchases from January 11, 2010 will have no illegal code (as does Office/Word 2010).
This basically results into 2 different Office/Word versions. I wonder how long it takes before the first incompatibility bug raises its ugly head.......

Thankfully I won't have to deal with this in my personal life.

The World Will End In Chaos

Microsoft Word 2007according to Microsoft lawyers. Dell, HP, and lots of other 'partners' would feel this in their wallets. Not to mention the consumer (who now can go and discover other means of writing a letter).

This is the responds to the court ruling that Microsoft offended a XML patent. The ruling states that Microsoft can't sell MS-Word in its current form, so that means MS Office without its flagship Word.

This case proves once again that software patents are killing business. Not that I favor Microsoft in this, but basically the software patents are nothing more than a (logical) way of solving problems (how to do this, how to do that, etc). In theory someone could have filed a patent on 'breathing' (a way to solve the possible problem of dying). But there's prior art on that one :).

Anyway, should the XML capable version of Word go away, you can always use OpenOffice to open those documents. In theory (!!!) that should work, but we all know about Microsoft and (open) standards.