What happens when a Canadian firm sues a Washington State company in East Texas? The answer? Microsoft cannot sell one of its flagship products, MS Word, in the United States because of patent infringement.
Word 2007’s default format is XML based. The results of the suit? Microsoft infringed on a patented process for processing XML held by I4I. If the appeal that Microsoft filed is not upheld, then sales of Word 2007 and all future versions of this program (and Office if affected) stops in the U.S. on October 10, 2009. The story is here.
How will this ultimately turn out? Ask Stack. They won a compression technology suit against Microsoft more than a decade ago. Winning against Microsoft is not a guarantee of victory, but it is a foreshadowing of a big windfall and disappearing as a corporate entity.