Microsoft loses lawsuit, but can Word users still be hurt?

Recently, Microsoft lost its appeal of a lawsuit that was brought against it for patent infringement involving using XML data in Word documents. I’ve read that the upcoming versions of Office 2010 and Word 2010 don’t use the technology that was the subject of the lawsuit. However, what could be the impact on users of Office 2007 and Word 2007? Assuming that many people won’t upgrade to the new versions (at least not right away), this brings up the larger question of how a dominant app such as Word can potentially be “crippled” and affect millions of users.