Ha!

Microsoft asks court to hold off on Word ban

Microsoft Corp. is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to allow it to keep selling Word software as it fights an unfavorable patent ruling.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas found Microsoft infringed on a patent held by a Canadian company, i4i LLP. Last week, the judge ordered Microsoft to pay $290 million and to stop selling copies of its word processing program that use the patented technology within 60 days.

The patent relates to the way Word 2003 and 2007 let users customize document encoding.

I still get the horrors when I have to work in Word, compared to using my beloved Wordperfect.

You know what really annoys me? I sometimes have young people in my office who have only ever used Word, and think it bizarre that I am a holdout for Wordperfect. (Mind you, every Word user who tries Wordperfect picks it up with no training and find it quite intuitive.) But when I have a formatting problem with Word that I can't work out, and go to these university graduates who have used Word all of their lives, 9 times out of 10 they can't work out the problem either. They can't identify why Word is doing it, and either give up or (at most) suggest a complicated and arcane work around.

The big defenders of the product rarely know how to get around a problem when using it.

There's no way in the world anyone is going to convince me that Word is a better program than Wordperfect.