"Even if Microsoft ultimately succeeds on appeal, it will never be able to recoup the funds expended in redesigning and redistributing Word, the sales lost during the period when Word and Office are barred from the market, and the diminished goodwill from Microsoft's many retail and industrial customers," the company said.

Elsewhere, Microsoft painted a bleak picture for users. "Even if the injunction will not affect Microsoft's existing Office customers, consumers and businesses 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."

During the trial, Microsoft said it would take five months for it to craft new versions of Word that omitted the offending feature. i4i countered, saying that it could be done much faster than that with a software patch.

Last week, Barry Negrin, a partner with the New York firm Pryor Cashman LLP who has practiced patent and trademark law for 17 years, agreed with i4i, saying that Microsoft should be able to work around the injunction with an "easy technical" fix. "All Microsoft has to do is disable the custom XML feature, which should be pretty easy to do, then give that a different SKU number from what's been sold so it's easy to distinguish the two versions," said Negrin said in an .

In May, a Texas jury awarded i4i $200 million in damages for Microsoft's patent infringement. Davis added another $40 million in "enhanced damages" for Microsoft's "willful infringement," and additional damages and interest that brought the total to $290.6 million.