Microsoft quietly shuts down Office Genuine Advantage program

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsoft-quietly-shuts-down-office-genuine-advantage-program/2798

by ilamont • 16 years ago

78 52 16 years ago

wccrawford• 16 years ago

I'm kind of surprised by this. If they had just shut down the bit that forces you to validate, but left a way for you to validate your copy, that would make more sense to me.

I mean, some people might genuinely want to know for sure.

Of course, it's possible that they shut this down while they put up something even more bothersome.

jcromartie• 16 years ago

> I mean, some people might genuinely want to know for sure.

Are these the same people that want to go through TSA screenings just to make sure they aren't dangerous?

martey• 16 years ago

I have known people who bought used computers or Office software, and had no idea that their software was pirated until they attempted to reinstall it. While it is sometimes obvious when software is pirated, it often is not.

andreyf• 16 years ago

Arr, my mateys, the battle is ours!

ShabbyDoo• 16 years ago

Microsoft relies on Office piracy as a strange means of price discrimination. The product requires network effects to maintain its near-monopoly position in the corporate world, and having a significant portion of people in "document sharing" networks say, "I don't have Office" is a threat. So, what Microsoft's quietly made decision says to me is that they are worried that a sufficiently large enough portion of computer users were both unwilling to pay for Office and unwilling to bother pirating it.

On Black Friday, many online retailers were running specials on a Home/Student Office "Family Pack" -- three legal installs for $100. This is a midpoint between the corporate price point and free. Perhaps an attempt to introduce another segment? I recall the availability of home/student editions in the past, but the price points were always much higher.

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

I think Microsoft is attempting to target students more aggressively, perhaps because of the appearance of other cheap/free options on the market in recent years. Just last year Office 2007 was on sale to students at $60.

iends• 16 years ago

The university my wife attends (in the USA) has some kind of weird site license where students get it for free from the IT department if they are willing to drop off their laptop with the university. (This isn't a bad deal, since probably the average freshman also buys their laptop from the university anyway). They can pay $10 to get the DVD themselves. (This is a very large state supported school.)

My school (even larger and state supported) charges like $92 for the same thing.

I've not figured out why two almost identical schools about 20 miles apart have such a different pricing scheme for their students.

I do know that in our relationship, my wife buys all the software. :)

ugh• 16 years ago

My university in Germany offers all students all somewhat current versions of Windows for free (including Windows 7 Professional), you can download it as often as you want and generate a ton of keys. It would actually be more useful for me if they offered Office but they don’t. You can get Office for less than 100€, though.

Tangurena• 16 years ago

Our corporate parent has some sort of deal with Microsoft that lets you purchase a legit copy for $10 (total with shipping and sales tax is about $27 if you want the DVD delivered). The folks at the office (who have taken advantage of it) mention that they've also been allowed the 3-machine activation per key.

arethuza2• 16 years ago

Sounds like an Enterprise Agreement - they are pretty standard for larger organizations. They seem to come with Home Usage licenses which were described to us as "free" but with a £10 delivery cost for the download!

evgeny0• 16 years ago

+1 Perhaps it's their way of dealing with the fact that Office is just too expensive for many people, without acknowledging that to the public by dropping the price.

People who don't use Office for business would struggle to justify $209 AUD (RRP for Home and Student edition) to themselves just to write the occasional letter - even if they're not aware of Google Docs or other alternatives.

jl6• 16 years ago

There is one important network effect they seem to be neglecting - the "big ball of mud" network effect of having hundreds of Excel spreadsheets all linked into each other, forming critical parts of the finance infrastructure of megacorps. This kind of end-user-computing nightmare is so hard to migrate away from that most companies can't even conceive how to do it.

However, regulatory schemes like SOX in the USA and Solvency II and Basel III in Europe, are forcing the issue. Big banks and insurers won't be allowed to carry on running critical finance operations on such a fragile stack, so there are currently huge migrations away from Excel happening all across the financial services industry. Software like SAS and Business Objects seem to be the anti-Excels of choice.

There will obviously still be Excel on the desktop, used for ad-hoc data manipulation and visualization, which is what it is actually good for, but this type of usage is much easier to replace with something like OpenOffice.

Tyrannosaurs3• 16 years ago

My experience is that corporates have no great desire to migrate away from Office though.

Finance users will insist (with some justification) that OO Calc isn't as good as Excel, the training department will point out reskilling costs for all the admin staff, the senior managers won't be keen to move away from PowerPoint which they all know and all of a sudden a few hundred quid a head will seem not worth saving.

iwwr• 16 years ago

If you run a print/copy shop or need Office for precise in-company document compatibility (or addins), you will want MS Office and you will easily afford a license or two.

As for everyone else, OpenOffice has 99% of the features, so it's not even worth the trouble of pirating it.

omh2• 16 years ago

As for everyone else, OpenOffice has 99% of the features, so it's not even worth the trouble of pirating it.

But pirating it just got a little bit easier, so Microsoft have shifted the balance a little away from OpenOffice.

compay• 16 years ago

Microsoft releasing actual legitimate open source code (http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/) , and relaxing restrictions on "piracy." Next thing you know, Windows 9 will be based on Linux.

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

Next thing you know, Windows 9 will be based on Linux.

I don't think I'd stop partying & celebrating for at least a week. Non-stop.

That is my personal private dream- that one day, Windows will have a true Unix core like OSX.

epochwolf2• 16 years ago

I think Microsoft would just run chmod 777 and chown root:wheel to the entire filesystem (and any attached disks) and then proceed to run everything as root with a special sandbox for users based on ACLs.

And they would probably use ext2 and add journals to it.

jpr• 16 years ago

Your dream, my nightmare.

latch• 16 years ago

I'm a fan of MS Word, I really am. These days though, I find that, as an amateur writer, I prefer simpler tools - markdown or google docs. I think this is a slow trend they are (or should be) worried about.

For home users, gmail thoroughly beats Outlook.

Excel is a different beast. I don't have much experience with it, but I've seen it used widely at various places of work (medical and financial). I'd say Excel is now their strongest product when it comes to maintaining a stranglehold.

When you consider the price, advances in google docs, gmail and and OpenOffice, I'm not sure Office is really a good value for most folk. They think they need it - that's a dangerous position to be in - selling a product because people think they need it, rather than actually needing it.

veb• 16 years ago

Agreed.

In my opinion, Word is the best app ever to come from Microsoft.

CountSessine3• 16 years ago

Really? What do you like about it?

Maybe I'm just prejudiced against WYSIWYG word processors in general, but I've always considered Word a bit of a usability and productivity disaster. What am I missing using LaTeX or Framemaker?

Now Excel, on the other hand - the world would just stop working without Excel.

yardie• 16 years ago

I disagree, Excel is the best app ever to come out of Microsoft! :-)

I've done entire engineering courses (200 and 300-level) with nothing but Excel. And there are certainly more powerful applications to do maths in but once you get past the simple interface it real is quite powerful.

S_A_P• 16 years ago

Excel is the tool of choice for non techies who need "database like" functionality but the word database scares the crap out of them. Large companies wrap multi million dollar businesses around Excel, and I think there will always be a market for an app like this.

I only recently began using Office 2010 at my office and feel like this is what office 2003(or if Im feeling generous, 2007) should have been. Outlook is an anachronism as far as Im concerned- even connected to exchange. There are so many modal features about it still that are infuriating, but its getting to an almost gmail usability level. If gmail integrated calendaring as well as outlook I would forward all my work email to a gmail address and never touch outlook.

MsWord stil is hands down much better than any free equivalent I have tried, but I only need this app ~5 - 10 times per year.

I wish they had an "Office for people who really dont need office that much" version that was on some sort of azure/pay for need basis(where the cost was minimal and paying wasn't) because that is what I need. I dont want to have a few GB of hardly used real estate on my hard disk for when I need to update a resume.

Ingaz• 16 years ago

>>Excel is the tool of choice for non techies who need "database like" functionality but the word database scares the crap out of them.

In fact I use Excel only as client for MS Analysis Services. It's my tool of choice. Not flawless, but I can't find something better.

danshapiro• 16 years ago

A lot of commenters seem confused about this: you still have to validate Office to get it to work, or pirate it to circumvent the check. The change is that Microsoft will let you download Office add-ons without verifying that said validation occurred, so pirate versions can now access the downloads.

Microsoft quietly shuts down Office Genuine Advantage program

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