Now, I am not a lawyer. But, I’ve been reporting on IP (intellectual property) law issues for years now, so I know something about how these issues are resolved, and when I see that one attorney thinks there’s an “easy technical work-around” for Microsoft’s patent violation in Word, my alarm bells go off. There is no easy fix here, and, short of waving the white-flag, Microsoft may very well have to stop selling Word, and thus Microsoft Office, this fall.
Here’s why the “easy” solutions really don’t work.
First, there’s the suggestion from the attorney that “All Microsoft has to do is disable the custom XML feature, which should be pretty easy to do, then give that a different SKU number from what’s been sold so it’s easy to distinguish the two versions.” Oh yeah, that’s easy.
The custom feature, described by patent # 5787449, covers a fast way of saving XML (eXtended Markup Language) documents. Microsoft uses it to save documents in Word 2003′s default .DOCX and Word 2007′s default Open XML format. If you think for one second that changing something so fundamental as how documents are saved and their formats is easy, you’ve never done any programming at all. Even if you could magically change that, there are endless processes in Word that would need to be modified to deal with the new way of saving and reading documents.
