MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Gen-9, Inc. (www.gen-9.net) announced today that, as a result of a recent Microsoft announcement restricting the use of the 2007 Microsoft Office User Interface to non-competing products, Gen-9 will be no longer be implementing the 2007 Microsoft Office User Interface in NOAH. Gen-9 was one of the first companies to implement the new interface in one of its products. The 2007 Microsoft Office compliant components utilized in NOAH were supplied by one of Gen-9’s licensed component vendors.
NOAH was made available as part of a limited Beta released on Sept 27, 2006. Microsoft announced the new licensing terms for the Office User Interface on November 21, 2006, which restricted its use to products that do not compete with 2007 Microsoft Office applications.
“While we have not positioned NOAH as a direct competitor to any of the Microsoft Office applications, others who have seen or tested the Beta version of NOAH believe that it is. So, we thought that this would be a prudent change to make,” said Mark A. Fauci, Gen-9’s President and CEO.
“Microsoft’s 2007 Office UI licensing restriction took a lot of people in the industry by surprise. When we first reviewed the language we thought it was intended to address competing office suite products such as StarOffice and OpenOffice. But as more information became available the picture became less clear. We think it will be some time before the industry can fully assess both the intended and unintended consequences of Microsoft’s new licensing terms. We believe that Noah is among a large number of products on the market, or under development, that can be considered a competing product to one or more of the 2007 Microsoft Office applications (which include Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Access, InfoPath, Publisher, OneNote and Groove). As a Company that’s selected .NET as a development platform, we find this licensing restriction to be problematic, to say the least.”
“The impact on our users will be limited to temporarily suspending our Beta test of NOAH while we remove the vendor supplied UI components covered by the terms of the 2007 Microsoft Office User Interface license. We apologize to our users for any inconvenience this may cause. We will be making the next version of NOAH available, along with a lot of great new enhancements and features, early in 2007.”
About Noah
NOAH is a new concept in Internet data management software that integrates email, Web pages, RSS feeds, contacts, scheduling, Web based applications, desktop application files and other data into a single, customizable, easy to use client interface.
About Gen-9, Inc.
Gen-9, Inc. (www.gen-9.net), a Delaware Corporation, is privately held. It was founded in 2005 to develop easy to use software tools that enable more productive use of the Internet. The Company’s main office is located in Mountain View California.
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