Judge Rules That Microsoft Can’t Sell Word and Has to Pay Nearly $300 Million in Damages

Sometimes you wake up, rub your eyes, fire up the day’s news stories, and have to rub your eyes again to make sure you’ve read a headline correctly. Yesterday, a Texas judge ruled that Microsoft can no longer sell Word because of a patent infringement. Go ahead and read that again just to wrap your brain around it. Judge Leonard Davis ordered a permanent injunction that “prohibits Micrsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML,” according to the Toronto-based plaintiff, i4i Inc. Judge Davis ordered Microsoft to cough up $290 million in damages for violating i4i’s patent. Apparently, the beef is over how Word reads XML files. Microsoft, naturally, will appeal. It’s difficult to imagine  a computing world without Word, but if this ruling sticks, what would you use as a substitute?  Google Docs & Spreadsheets? OpenOffice? Zoho? [Hat tip: Seattle Pi]