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MS Issues Word Patch To Comply With Court Order
bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that Microsoft has begun offering what appears to be a patch for its popular Word software, allowing it to comply with a recent court ruling which has banned the software giant from selling patent-infringing versions of the word processing product. The workaround should put an end to a long-running dispute between Canadian i4i and Redmond, although it has hinted that the legal battle might yet take another turn."
This is a civil lawsuit. The point is to make the plaintiff whole and cause the infringement to cease. It is not about any sort of punishment.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Groklaw has it.
It's very hard not to agree with the court that Microsoft wilfully infringed. Furthermore, it seems they expected to be caught, and to lose the inevitable suit - and didn't care either. Not hard to see why: The damages awarded are equivalent to just two days' revenue for Microsoft (although they infringed for five years). As a commenter pointed out, that's why such cases are unlikely to change their posture on software patents; even when they lose in that arena (and they are serial infringers, frequently losing such cases) - they have already made a huge profit on the whole dirty business. Same old Microsoft.
The way damages were calculated is detailed by the document linked (and was upheld by appeal, as it most likely substantially underestimated the real damages).
you had me at #!
Because they want consistency across all copies of the same version of Office?
This isn't totally honest.
The transition from Office 97 to Office 2000 caused major headaches because of the lack of proper support for .doc format. People got thru that by recreating many documents, or just doing without them, or waiting until a service pack came out many months later.
Ditto with the transition from Office 2003 to 2007. I've dealt with numerous cases, especially with Powerpoint, where opening and saving in Office 2007 totally fucked up a document. Stuff disappeared, or was rearranged. One case, where the boss got a new laptop 2 days before a conference. His old one died and his new one came with Office 2007. He edited his presentation, saved it as an Office 2003 .ppt and sent it to his assistant to finish. It was totally fubar, but she only edited a few slides in the beginning and didn't see the mess later on. When she sent it to him, her edits looked like crap to him and his earlier edits were gone. It was a nightmare that saw the assistant recreate the entire thing from a printout the day before the conference -- and a total office ban on Office 2007 the day after.
Shit happens, even when exclusively in the MS world. People would redo the documents that didn't translate properly. They'd bitch, but they'd do it. I've seen it time and time again over the last 20+ years. Wordstar (dot commands FTW!) to Wordperfect to Word; Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel; god-knows-what to Visio; and don't even get me started on CAD!
And SuSE, Red Hat, TRW or IBM would be happy to take your money for a support contract.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
That's not worth the electrons you used to type that sentence. Through work, I have had a "platinum" trouble ticket open with these idiots for about 6 years now. It's a pretty serious issue - documents that become corrupted either while they are being edited, or when opened and then closed. Not trivial stuff - characters just change from one thing to another. They haven't even made a decent effort to resolve it. Their solution to document corruption is to get a correct printed copy, somehow, then scan it in as a TIFF file. This from a senior tech at MS. Not only that, they have consistently been unable to get a simple NDA signed and ITAR certification so that I can give them some of the examples. The sticking point is that they seemingly can't ensure that all the people working it are US citizens. That's not asking a lot for the kind of money that my very large aerospace company pays them in support costs, for this serious an issue.
Brett
MS Office skills are marketable at any age.
What exactly are MS Office skills?
Typing, and bold.
"Advanced skills" include italics and
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco