MSFT Hoped Word 11 Would Render i4i "Obsolete"
Earlier in the week Microsoft made headlines following a court ruling that said the Redmond-based company could no longer sell Microsoft Word in the United States because it infringed upon a patent belonging to i4i.
Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, this week ordered a permanent injunction that 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. The ruling is the result of a patent infringement suit filed by Toronto-based i4i who acquired a patent covering software designed to manipulate "document architecture and content," in 1998.
Today we learn that Microsoft was not only aware of its infringement but hoped that in time, with the release of newer versions, it could render i4i's product "obsolete."
InformationWeek cites court documents in its claims that Microsoft threatened to make i4i's product obsolete with the release of Word 11. "We saw [i4i's products] some time ago and met its creators. Word 11 will make it obsolete," said Martin Sawicki, a member of Microsoft's XML for Word development team, in an e-mail to a colleague. "It looks great for XP though," wrote Sawicki, according to court records.
Microsoft has said it will appeal the judgment which also requires the company to pay i4i $290 million.
Read more on InformationWeek.

Way to go MS.....sort of earned this one
None. They would just make lightbulbs obsolete with their own newer versions.
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Although, with all the blacklash they've gotten from the EU recently (and to a lesser extent, the meaningless anti-trust decision from the U.S. government years ago), you'd think they'd be less blatant about it.
Way to go MS.....sort of earned this one
None. They would just make lightbulbs obsolete with their own newer versions.
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copy and paste feature or the find feature excat same thing , 300 million is WAY overboard for a little shit company
That is going to be a serious problem for North America.
I sure don't feel like implementing some other form of office into our environment... Not to mention the training involved because almost everyone uses some form of office.
We have local office on laptops/Desktops and it is also installed on our Citrix environment
u do know that this only affects Office 2007/2008 only right?
So what, we are supposed to just let MS do whatever they want because a lot of people use their stuff? So if someone is big in an certain area of software they can take anything from lesser companies at will? Like its some kind of public service.
Ok, so what you are saying is that Oracle can just take SQL server code from MS since they are smaller. Google can just take the code for Bing because it's tiny in the market. Adobe can just take what they want from Silverlight. There are a lot of areas that MS is a small player or even complete loser, like A/V, Money comes to mind, and many more. So it would apply to them as well.
With that in mind, and the fact that open source based or other forms of word software can be had alot cheaper, it will make them more likely to use/purchase open source based software.
Its a loose loose situation for M$, and considering they got caught red handed avoiding the best outcome, ie paying i4i and working something out, I think i4i deserve every cent of this fine.
They patented a method of mapping the normally "in-line" formatting so it sits outside the actual text. Does MS even do this? I can't see the benefit of using a system like this. You still have to edit both the content AND the formatting at the same time, contrary to the claims of the patent, if you edit the text without editing the map all of your formatting will be offset.