You Can't Buy Microsoft Word in the US?

I'd like to find one review, just one, that doesn't completely rave about how Mi
crosoft Office is the most perfect office suite on the planet, has always been,
and always will be. There are certainly competing products, WordPerfect Office,
StarOffice and Lotus Symphony for example, But it is still Microsoft's Office th
at wins all the way. The competition couldn't even compete with Office in one ar
ea, like the popular Word. Until now. Anyone who uses Word 2007 would notice tha
t the program defaults to saving documents in a .docx file format - the x in th
ere stands for XML. And in XML lie all the problems. A tiny software company cal
led i4i sued Microsoft for plagiarizing its programming work to give Word its X
ML capability, and it won. And the court in Texas but ruled against Microsoft sa
ys they can't sell Word in the US anymore the way it is. Microsoft's competitors
in the office suite market must really be rejoicing; who would've thought that
they would get such a break? When people can't buy Microsoft Word, they might lo
ok at some competing products, is the hope. Well, they don't need to order the c
hampagne already; Microsoft was always preparing for this eventuality, and stock
ed up on Office packages that had that feature removed. And Microsoft Office 201
0 doesn't include it, from the get-go. So what is this all about really?
The little Canadian company that is in the center of all of this, i4i, used to b
e a partner in Microsoft's business; they licensed their XML editing technology
to Microsoft back when Word 2003 was sold. But then Microsoft decided to roll th
eir own, and unhitched i4i. But they didn't really do any programming; they just
went ahead and used i4i's coding without telling them. Microsoft just doesn't w
ant to pay up. And i4i has been suing them ever since. They just finally won, an
d not only must Microsoft's stop selling Word this way, they must pay the little
company about $300 million as well.
So how does this affect you and me? Well, for a short time you won't be able to
buy Microsoft Word at any stores that carry the regular version; they're not goi
ng to come after you and take away your existing copy of Word, but if you have a
utomatic updates turned on, they will make a little modification to your install
ation in the US, and make it so that it won't save in the .docx file format anym
ore. If you try to open a previously-saved .docx file, it will open it, but if y
ou've put in any real geekery in there with what they call Custom XML markup ele
ments, well, those particular features won't open in those documents. This isn't
really a big deal; no one even knows these things exist, live alone knows how t
o use them. The only big deal is that Microsoft was made to stop freely taking a
dvantage of its cash cow.
But what if it puts the whole ODF initiative at risk? Open Document Format is a
real boon to the open-source community. We can't all afford to buy Microsoft Wor
d. If the open-source effort is affected, that would be something to worry about
.