A quick search of the Intellectual Property Office patent database shows quite a few from microsoft. An article by Adam Gifford in the New Zealand Herald recently brought this to my attention:

Patent 525484, accepted by the office and now open for objections until the end of May, says Microsoft invented and owns the process whereby a word-processing document stored in a single XML file may be manipulated by applications that understand XML.

Of course this is a defensive strategy designed to prevent other programs from openning/reading/writing MS documents and try to force users to use MS products.

This is bad two ways: bad for MS and bad for users.

How is it bad for Microsoft? The history is well documented: look at betamax and DAT compared to VHS and CDs. The open standards are mainstream while the proprietary standards (despite arguably being ‘better’) lost and were relegated to niche markets. It’s bad for users because it tries to shoehorn them into MS products.

As a bit of a though experiment: Suppose a pen manufacturer required that all document written with their pens could only be editited using their pens. Would they be granted a patent for the writing process? Microsoft are not using magic ink, nor magic paper: it’s been done before.

I don’t know enough about patent law to lodge an objection to it. But a document is a document whether it is electronic or not. Using microsoft’s pen because of how it is written is not something that should be forced upon me.