A Texas judge has ruled that Microsoft is not only in patent violation against a company called i4i, which, apparently, owns the ability to create custom XML documents, but must also halt sales of Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007 within 60 days.
ZDNet said that i4i’s patent “sounds a bit generic,” but the court ruled in their favor, granting them $200M in damages.
Did anyone else notice that the name of the company is a homonym with “Eye for (an) Eye?”
Anyway, Microsoft probably has workarounds and legal avenues to pursue before it stops selling Word, but if need be, Microsoft may just have to offer a “Texas Edition” of Word without the XML capabilities.
So if they’re going to do that anyway, allow me to suggest some other improvements to the Texas edition.
- Standard Font: Calibri at 13 points, rather than 11. Everything is bigger in Texas.
- When a program crash happens, instead of giving up, Texas Word will fight off thousands of kernel panics and memory errors to give Sam Houston time to save his documents.
- Texas Word will come in two editions: Mild and Extra Spicy.
- Clippy will run for Governor, and get at least 12.43% of the vote on a platform of “It looks like y’all are trying to run a state.”
- Texas Word doesn’t worry about overheating CPUs. After a few years, you get used to the heat.
- Finally, I was going to suggest “Y’all” should no longer trigger spell check, but it actually doesn’t. Try it out. However, a truly Texan Word would include “Ahma,” and “Dija” as in, “Ahma goin’ to the store, Dija need anything?”
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