A judge on Tuesday ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word, one of its premier products, in its current form due to patent infringement.

Microsoft was issued a permanent injunction against selling Microsoft Word products due to a patent infringement dispute with a Canadian company called i4i.

A ban on Microsoft selling certain versions of its flagship products Word and Office has begun.

Although the mainstream media has tried to make it a big deal, a closer look at the recent court ruling ordering Microsoft to stop selling Word, shows it's really not going to have very much impact.

Microsoft has attempted to block the court-ordered end to sales of Microsoft Word over a patent dispute. But court papers show that company officers were aware of the patent when they took the infringing action.

A U.S. federal appeals court has upheld a $290-million US judgment against Microsoft Corp. in a patent case launched by Toronto-based i4i Inc., and issued an injunction that will prevent the sale of its popular Word software.

In InfoWorld's tests using complex Word and Excel documents, OpenOffice.org 3.1 failed to deliver on its promise of better Microsoft Office interoperability, severely mangling our Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel test data files. By stark contrast, SoftMaker Office showed excellent compatibility.

AbiWord is a free opensource word processing program like Microsoft Word or Openoffice. Abiword is a light weight multi-platform word processor and is rapidly becoming a state of the art Word Processor, with lots of features useful for your daily work, personal needs, or for just some good old typing fun.

It's a radical departure, this news from Microsoft (MSFT) that openness between its products and the rest of the universe is more than a hollow platitude. To take Microsoft at its Word, given this release, is to open an era of an entirely new Microsoft. But is it?