August 24, 2009

Microsoft Corp.warned last week that an injunction preventing it from selling Word in the U.S. after Oct. 10 would cause "massive disruptions" to sales of its Office software, as well as to key partners like Best Buy Co., Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co.

A week earlier, U.S. District Court Judge Leonard Davis had issued the injunction and ordered that Microsoft pay $290 million in damages and interest to Toronto-based i4i Inc. for infringing on that company's patent for a document system that uses XML custom formatting.

The i4i technology allows users of Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word for Mac 2008 to create custom XML documents. In its emergency motion filed Aug. 18 with the U.S. Court of Appeals, Microsoft warned of the business disruption and asked that the injunction be stayed during the appeal.

Even if Microsoft ultimately succeeds on appeal, it will never be able to recoup the funds expended in redesigning and redistributing Word, the sales lost during the period when Word and Office are barred from the market, and the diminished goodwill from Microsoft's many retail and industrial customers," Microsoft argued.

Source:-http://www.computerworld.com