Microsoft Watch Reports:

Less than a day after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decided to uphold the original verdict in the i4i patent-infringement case, ordering Microsoft to stop selling Word by Jan. 11, Redmond issued a patch that (at least at first glance) sidesteps the alleged infringement. […]

“With respect to Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007, we have been preparing for this possibility since the District Court issued its injunction in August 2009 and have put the wheels in motion to remove this little-used feature from these products,” read a Dec. 22 statement issued by Kevin Kutz, Microsoft’s director of public affairs. “Therefore, we expect to have copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Office 2007, with this feature removed, available for U.S. sale and distribution by the injunction date.

There is no roadblock that Microsoft cannot throw money at until they develop a workaround, until there is.

Grant Brissey covered everything from hard news and technology, to music, film, and visual arts during his time working for The Stranger. Grant's work has also appeared at Geekwire, and in Billboard,...

13 replies on “Re: Wordless”

  3. On the other hand, I find it fascinating that 35 million BlackBerrys crashed for more than six hours last night because of a faulty upgrade to BlackBerry Messenger (which almost nobody uses). File this under “What in the Fuck Were They Thinking?”

  4. More to the point, there’s no roadblock that Microsoft cannot throw another ten or twenty megabytes at. If you’re not on broadband, connected 24/7, you’re not getting the updates you need. They average about one a day, ten or twenty meg. It never ends.

  5. @3, one would think after 10+ years that RIM would get its act together and become a competent network service provider. But nope, it’s the same mistakes over and over again. Incredibly frustrating.

  6. god DAMN those dastardly folks in Ms for OBEYING A COURT ORDER IMMEDIATELY!

    Gnashing of teeth, etc. The effrontery — they litigate, they lose and then they OBEY THE COURT ORDER!

    MANohman, why won’t they start not obeying court orders when they lose, the behemoth that they are!

  8. Oh-oh

    Shades of Bill Clinton:

    1. Proposed a health care plan
    2. Attacked Microsoft

    Result:

    Will we learn about Barack Obama getting BJs from under his desk by interns?

  12. The patent is pretty narrow, though I’m sure they’re interpreting it as broadly as possible. It covers a new method to specify, apply, and manage document formatting.

    Rather than doing what had been done for years prior, using tags within a text file to describe desired output formatting (e.g., tags surrounding text that you want to appear italicized), the invention instead uses one file containing only the raw text, and and separate file mapping the formatting onto it.

    The most rudimentary form of this mapping would be a second file specifying that characters 0 to 6 of the first file are italic. Of course, there are file structures that feature far more elaborate mapping systems.

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