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Corporations Suffer Microsoft Activation Bug

Posted by michael on from the under-the-yoke dept.

Uncle Bob writes "Trustworthy Computing, eat your heart out! As of the 2003-04-14 update, people are reporting that Office 2000 SR1a is now asking to be "registered" again. And again, and again. Very little information has been posted on the traditional news sites (the only link I could find was The Register. Note - The Register's story is not quite accurate, but the registration bug is real. Our company with approx 80,000 PCs has been hit...."

1 of 596 comments (clear)

  1. Re:80,000 by TWagers · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I'm replying to this comment up here instead of the dozen or so I see lower down because people will probably see this one first. =)

    There IS a cost to OpenOffice, and it's a steep one. In my company, they are thousands and thousands of PC's and Laptops, and tens of thousands of employees marrily plunking away with MS Office. They know the application. They are comfortable with it. They are lots of people around them that can answer questions about it, and they are literally millions of docoments created with it that *work*.

    Now, if you try to deploy OpenOffice, chaos on an immense scale would result - Documents would be screwy, people would be lost and confused, and productivity would drop like a rock. Morale would drop since people couldn't do their jobs, and god help us if people couldn't access the terabytes of mail stored in Outlook .pst files. When you add up the lost productivity and support and training costs, it would easily be in the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

    Free software is free for folks like you and me, but in the hands of the barely-computer literate, the costs can be enormous.