back to article Microsoft Office 2007 retailers dodge patent injunction

Microsoft might have pulled Office 2007 from its online shop but retailers are still selling the suite. Retailers can sell Office 2007 if the copies they purchased were bought before a US-court-mandated deadline of January 11, 2010, Microsoft told The Reg on Tuesday. Upgrade and full copies of Office 2007 were available from …

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  1. N2

    Not relevent to article, but

    How in Gods name do they think they can charge $679.95 or £679.95 in the UK

    Is it a five user pack?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Worse...

    "... would no longer read the custom XML mark up contained within .DOCX, .DOCM or .XML files after January 10."

    You have got to love the irony here. That MS "open standard" containing custom XML mark up now is hit by a patent lawsuit. Had they used .odf in the first place they could have prevented this!

    It also hurts MS' PR machine. Since now they can't say to (government) customers, that ask for open standards, that their software is capable of reading and writing them.

    1. The BigYin

      Like the government cares

      Here in the UK, they have just spunked £300million in promoting MS products and trying to buy the next election...I mean...improve children's education.

    2. Luther Blissett

      more irony

      It is even more ironic that erstwhile competitor WordPerfect was enabled to handle SGML/XML markup in its data files by the trivial technical expedient of defining a couple of control codes - nothing fancy, no patents needed, no fuss - and with not much more work could even have become the first application supporting SGML's concurrent document feature, i.e. markup from multiple DTDs. Meh x2

  3. Andy Jones

    Ridiculous

    34 versions of Office? That is just plain ridiculous. Why so many? Are they just trying to confuse people into buying the wrong version then pay more to get the correct version?

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Ridiculous irony...

      ...that it looks like the most expensive version is available. Funny, that.

      Of course, this could explain a lot about Microsoft's internal workings - like why don't they maintain build flags so they can just run "make" (or whatever they use) and go get a cup of coffee while it builds the 34 versions for them... A bit of dicking around, it might even be able to package them all up ready for deployment again.

      Or is each one built and packaged one by one? Not what you'd expect of the "leading" software company, now, is it?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Horns

    British pounds, US dollars, Japanese yen

    Bill doesn't care because they are all the same to him: just pieces of prettily colored paper.

  5. Ammaross Danan
    Paris Hilton

    Alternative

    Last I checked, OpenOffice was free. It comes in a variety of versions though...one for PowerPC, one for Linux (x86 and x64), one for Windows (x86 and x64), one for MacOS, Solaris... well, you get the idea. Cross-platform, open-source, interoperability. Sure, it may not format a word doc 100% like the original, but if it did, I'm sure M$ would sue. "How dare you make a product that functions as well as ours and have the nerve to GIVE it away??!?!"

    Paris, because she's probably hiding a patent somewhere too....

    1. Blain Hamon
      Troll

      Psst

      A little bit of advice from a Mac fanboy: never use the term "M$". It's unnecessary, detracts from the point, and really destroys any credibility of the argument.

      Also, we're well aware that OpenOffice exists. But you mention the same reason I don't mention iWork here: Readers won't be looking for something that 'sorta works' but doesn't match 100%. The trick is to point out that not even MSFT (See what I did there? Using the stock ticker name is nice and neutral) Office matches itself 100%.

      So if you must troll, try something like the line below. No, it might not be fully true, but it works for FUD.

      "So does this mean that Office 2007 won't even be able to read Office 2007 files?"

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Making Word not compatible with Word

    If I get this correctly -- if someone saved a file in the at-the-time-default docx format then future editions of Word, including patched versions of the same copy of Word, will not be able to read it?

    I wonder if their license gives them immunity from such data loss.

    D'oh. Of course it does. This is Micro$oft.

    But a bomb ready to explode anyway.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      This has nothing to do with the docx formats

      This isn't going to affect Microsoft's ability to read and write docx or xml files.

      Word has a special feature which lets you use your own XML schema to produce XML documents with Word. I can't think of why you'd want to use Word to edit XML documents when much better tools exist for the purpose out there though.

  7. Tim Bates
    Thumb Down

    Oooooohhhhhhhhh

    This US court ruling would explain why 2 days ago I was unable to download the trial of Project 2007 after being sent to a generic redirect.... Who cares that I'm in Australia, not USA... Apparently court rulings in USA apply worldwide.

    And as is usual for stupid corporations, the email I sent went unnoticed because a moron paid minimum wage decided not to read it and instead just guess what it was about.

  8. Jason Yau
    Gates Horns

    Openoffice

    nuff said

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