Yesterday was not a good day for Microsoft. It lost the appeal in the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and must cease selling copies of Office that include Custom XML functionality by January 11, 2010. On top of that, it has to pay i4i (the Plaintiff) more than $290 million. It may sound like a big number, but it probably won’t hurt Microsoft much. We joke that $290 million is a little more than a rounding error for Microsoft accountants.
So what is all this hype about Custom XML? According to Microsoft, Custom XML is the support for custom-defined schemas (yawn). According to Mary-Jo Foley, Microsoft has already figured out a way to disable the Custom XML feature, which could be addressed via patch deployment. The injunction only applies to purchases after the 1/11/2010 date. If you already have Word 2007 or Office 2007, then you’re good to go without any additional patches.
- John and Mike
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