All Things Microsoft > Microsoft as a Company

Word - we dropped the ball

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worker201:
Microsoft Word will become illegal to sell on January 11, 2010.  That's like 3 weeks away, and I don't think anyone at this site picked up on the story.  Apparently they stole a patented XML implementation from a small company, who sued the shit out of them.  The article below implies that the entire tech industry assumed that the whole thing would blow over, and Microsoft would get around it.  But they didn't.  Current copies of Word will still be valid, and Microsoft can continue to support copies that have already been sold.  But new sales must cease immediately.  OpenOffice and Symphony downloads are probably going to skyrocket over the next few months.

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/158160

Aloone_Jonez:
Fucking brilliant.

No doubt they'll find a fix before the deadline though or they might deem it cheaper to break the law and be fined.

If they stop selling MS Office, not only will alternative office suits benefit I think it'll also push piracy up. I think it's too optimistic to presume that everyone who want MS Office and can no longer get it will change to a competing product, the chances are many will just pirate it.

davidnix71:
Does OO have a stripped down "word" version? It's a cd sized download otherwise.

Aloone_Jonez:
That's one of the most annoying things about OpenOffice: you have to download the whole thing.

The only thing I can suggest is AbiWord but it's not quite as feature rich as OpenOffice Writer.

worker201:
The fact that you can't get just OpenOffice Writer might be beside the point, because you can't buy Microsoft Office without Word.  I find it hard to believe that business people will buy Excel, Powerpoint, and Access as standalone packages and then go shopping for some other word processor.  I also feel compelled to point out that home users, who could probably get away with piracy, are not really a serious component of Microsoft's core business.  Large business clients, who purchase multi-seat licenses, are the big spenders, and they can't just go browsing on PirateBay.

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