What Microsoft’s Word woes mean to business

Barely two weeks after eBay revealed they may be forced to close down Skype, Microsoft has been ordered by a Texas court to cease selling Microsoft Word and pay more than $290 million in damages.

The court action was brought by Canadian company i4i over the use of XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, in Word.

XML is a standard for laying out documents and manipulating data. Most word processing packages and many other programs use XML for displaying documents.

So for Microsoft this is a big deal. They have 60 days to appeal or get a revised version of Office 2007 that doesn’t use the methods covered by the patent on the shelves.

For most Word users, this means very little, as XML isn’t used by most people on a day-to-day basis and your copy of Word 2007 or 2003 isn’t going to vanish off the hard drive.

There is a hiccup though – if you use a database or accounting program that generates letters, invoices or reports it’s likely XML is used in the process.

We can expect Microsoft to put out a patch in the next few weeks removing the infringing code from Word and that may stop these functions working on some systems.

So if you do have a database that generates reports into Office 2003 or Office 2007, check with your software provider to find out what they are doing to ensure their program won’t be affected by any changes to Word.

For Linux zealots and those of us with what passes for a long memory in the tech industry, this award against Microsoft has a delicious irony given two years ago Microsoft threatened to sue Linux users over patent infringements.

Microsoft never sued, or even told anyone what patents were being infringed, it appeared to be a clumsy attempt to scare people off using the free operating system.

Thankfully i4i isn’t going to follow Microsoft’s example of threatening to sue Word users, which should bring a sigh of relief to every single one of the millions of businesses who have Microsoft Office on their systems.

Microsoft however may want to reflect on the karma of making empty threats.

Paul Wallbank is a writer, speaker and broadcaster on technology issues. He founded national support organisation PC Rescue in 1995 and has spent over 14 years helping businesses get the most from their IT investment. His PC Rescue and IT Queries websites provide free advice to business computer users and his monthly newsletter has over 3000 subscribers.

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