“But people looking to buy Word or Microsoft’s Office package in the U.S. won’t have to go without the software. Microsoft said Tuesday it expects that new versions of the product, with the computer code in question removed, will be ready for sale when the injunction begins on Jan. 11,” Mintz reports.
“Toronto-based i4i Inc. sued Microsoft in 2007, saying it owned the technology behind a tool in the popular word processing program. The technology in question gives Word users an improved way to edit XML, or code that tells the program how to interpret and display a document’s contents,” Mintz reports. “A Texas jury found that Microsoft Word willfully infringed on the patent.”
Full article here.
Do you really need Microsoft’s Word? Give Apple’s free 30-day iWork ’09 trial – featuring Pages – a try and find out for yourself.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Tom R.” for the heads up.]
I’ll keep using Word until Pages can do cross-referencing and can merge data from Numbers as easily and well as Word merges data from Excel.
Apple iWork / Pages can open WORD docs & PAGES docs can be saved as WORD docs…
So…why do you need MS WORD at all?
Alansky,
as a matter of fact, there once was a superior word processing software. MacWritePro beat the pants off Word 5 and was still more stable and versatile than Word ’98, especially when it came to integrating figures (speak: layouting). We used MacWrite for all standard writing chores (even in classic mode after Jaguar and Panther replaced MacOS9) until Pages came along.
Like Tim Flint, I do all my professional and hobby writing in Pages, seamlessly exchanging manuscripts with partners in the WinWorld. Now that Pages interacts with EndNote (or rather the other way around), I have finally kicked Word from the Dock. Another excellent text processor is Bean which I often use for raw typing. It’s free and lightning fast, plus it can export as html.