Salesforce.com Sues Microsoft Over Cloud Software [businessweek.com]

Salesforce.com Inc. filed a patent- infringement lawsuit today against Microsoft Corp., escalating a fight between the two companies over the growing market for cloud-computing software.
Microsoft’s products such as .Net platform and SharePoint perform in a way that violates the Salesforce.com patents, and the “risk of infringement was either known or so obvious that it should have been known by Microsoft,” Salesforce.com said in the complaint.

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The complaint is in response to a patent-infringement lawsuit Microsoft filed in May against Salesforce.com, which pits the world’s largest software maker against the biggest seller of Internet-based customer-management programs. Microsoft targeted Salesforce.com’s customer-relationship management software and sought a court order that would prevent the company from providing features that Microsoft claims it invented.