All those crocodile tears from Microsoft about how other organisations are violating their patents, and it turns out that one of their premier products includes a serious violation of somebody else's patent.
Indeed.
However it would be interesting to know more about which xml element and just what they have broken.
XML is used by many applications not just word.. the 'language' can be specifically modified and schemas developed to support many different applications. Not just word processing, but many other types of applications may fall back on some sort of XML schema, (XML itself falls back on SGML) eg MCML for music.. the whole idea of XML allows you to build specialist extensions to allow compatibility between various software.
If MS have broken or used a schema or used a DTD or DOM or whatever that has been patented (wasnt aware that they were patented), I should imagine there would be a relitively easy work around for them to define another... down to the basics youre talking like changing <image> to say <img>.
How this would then affect older versions Ive word Ive no idea? would they need to release a patch?
... but then again Ive forgotten most of what I knew about XML because i never really got my head around the real indepth stuff properly.