Microsoft looses lawsuit but Word will stay

Headlines likes these have been grabbing people's attention online "Microsoft ordered to stop selling word in 2010". Well not entirely true. The story so far goes like this.

On Tuesday a judge's injunction was issued after a district court jury found that a feature in word 2007, and the office 2007 suite that includes word infringed a patent that was held by i4i. A Toronto software developer.

"The feature in question governs how programs deal with a specialized data format called XML, short for extensible markup language. It's arguable, as Computerworld writer Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes, that i4i never should have received this patent in the first place. But there also seems to be solid evidence that Microsoft knew about i4i's work before adding these features to Word."


Microsoft has said that they have put the wheels in motion to remove that little used feature before the Jan 11 deadline. Microsoft further said that Word 2010 and Office 2010 do not contain the feature cowered in that injunction. So word will not be going off the shelves on Jan 10 2010.

An original post by

Sociolatte