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It seems that Microsoft knew all along that they were going to get hit like a drum by i4i when the Canadian company won its XML patent lawsuit. Of course, that isn't what Microsoft said when the judge ordered Microsoft to pay i4i $290-million and stop selling any version of Word or Office that could create .XML, .DOCX or .DOCM files that contained custom XML formatting. But, now Microsoft has run up the white flag and the company is frantically jerking the feature out of its currently shipping Office programs.

Now, part of me wants to say it couldn't have happened to a nicer company. After all, Microsoft loves to play the bully with its own patent portfolio. Earlier this year, Microsoft used its patents like a sledgehammer on TomTom, the GPS device company.

I also find it more than a little funny to see how Microsoft was crying about how unfair it all was not just to Microsoft but, as Microsoft's lawyers put it at the time, to all the little people out there "who require new copies of Office and Word would be stranded without an alternative set of software." Microsoft's attorneys also claimed that the situation would be a "major public disruption," and would "have an effect on the public due to the public's undisputed and enormous reliance on those products."

Cry me a river. OpenOffice works just fineand it's free to boot.

It turns out Microsoft may not have really intended to appeal the case. They were only buying time to write their way around i4i's patent. Or, I should say, to try to write their way around it. You see, in today's U.S. legal system--keep in mind I'm not lawyer but this is my quick and dirty description--a patent isn't about specific lines of copyrighted code, it's about an expression of an idea. You can't simply delete the offending code; you have to get rid of the idea.

And the idea of i4i's patent # 5787449, which is entitled, "A system and method for the separate manipulation of the architecture and content of a document, particularly for data representation and transformations," is about as broad as you can get in a software patent.