December 22, 2009
Microsoft Word Banned
As of January 11, 2010 Microsoft will no longer be allowed to sell Microsoft Word.
Last August a federal court ruled that a Canadian company i4i holds the patent rights to how XML code is to be used.
A federal court has upheld the ruling and the software giant must stop all violations of i4i's patent.
Not only must they stop selling Word in its current form, Microsoft has to pay a $290 Million judgment.
The January deadline is fast approaching for Microsoft to roll out a fix for its Word product which is sold in shrink wrap boxes, downloaded or bundled with other Microsoft products in various versions of the Microsoft Office Suite.
Does this ruling mean that you will no longer be able to use the most popular word process on the market today?
No.
If you have Microsoft word you will still be able to use it as you always have, but Microsoft is definitely under the gun to roll out a work around until they can tweak the word processing software to be in compliance.
You can continue to purchase the software for use up to the deadline, but there will be no more updates with the violating code available for the product after January 11th.
This ruling has serious implications for users and for retailers.
Retailers who have purchased the product will have an unsellable product and manufactures who sell PCs and laptops will have to remove versions of Word that do not comply which will not be simple as most manufactures thought that Microsoft would find a way around this ruling.
There are alternatives for users of Microsoft Word such as the Open Office which is an open source code product that works with Word documents.
If you choose to use Open Office Writer which is similar to Word you may lose some formatting from your word documents, but most of the work will come when first converting you documents.
Microsoft says they will have the fix in place by the deadline as they are already removing the code violation from Word and Office 2007 products.
Word 2010 will be available next year and, according to Microsoft, contains none of the offending code.
Filed under Blog, Microsoft, Microsoft Office by Robb Cheuvront





