HP and Dell beg for Word ruling to be overturned

Please, please, please don't block the sale of Microsoft Word.

That's the message from HP and Dell, which have thrown themselves on the mercy of the court in asking for an overturning -- or at least a lengthy delay -- in the judgment that came down August 12 which explicitly banned the future sale of Word due to a patent infringement issue.

That ruling is still set to go into effect as the clock ticks down, with the deadline set to arrive on October 11, 60 days after it was originally handed down by the court.

Microsoft faces a hearing in the Court of Appeals in just two days on this issue, at which time perhaps we'll know more about whether the world of Microsoft Word and Office is about to become undone.

For their part, Dell and HP are basically arguing that it's unfair for them to get caught up in the dispute between two other parties, and that the injunction against the sale of Word (or the inclusion of it on new computers) would be devastating to their businesses. In asking for the 120-day delay, the companies are signaling that they wouldn't even be able to re-engineer the software images for their products to be Word-free quickly enough to comply with the verdict.

Really, of course, this is all about keeping business alive (and a little bit about keeping things on good terms with Microsoft).

With Windows 7 barely a month away, consumer demand is already starting to heat up in the personal computer market, defying expectations that people wouldn't start shopping for machines until Win 7 was officially released. However, free upgrade offers to Windows 7 -- which now come standard with virtually every PC on the market -- seem to be doing the job, and consumers appear to be not nearly as fearful as they have in the past, worried that the upgrade process won't go smoothly. However, if those new computers have to have Word stripped from their configuration, well, that could throw a severe wrench into what is the first real sign of life in the PC business in years.