How often do you use Microsoft Word? I don’t happen to use it very often in my current job as a retailer, but when I was more of an office worker I was using it most every day.
According to a recent court ruling Microsoft has been ordered to stop selling Word because it infringes on a patent held by Toronto-based i4i. The patent has something to do with custom XML, which is a way of encoding data fields in a document so that software can extract and interpret them.
This ruling appears to be a follow-up to a May ruling, which apparently Microsoft chose to ignore. At least that’s the way I read the article. Read it for yourself. (Here’s a longer article on the same subject.)
Do you think Microsoft should be forced to stop selling Word? If it does, how would that impact your life?
