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Corporations Suffer Microsoft Activation Bug
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...."
how long before someone sues microsoft for lost time/effort , 80000 pc's for a single company.. how many pc's total? Could it be in the millions?
The only thing I can think of protecting mircrosoft would be the EULA, but im no expert in that area.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Yes, and imagine the hell (and cost) when all 80,000 users are confused about how to use their computer and half of their complex .doc and powerpoint documents don't work right.
If you have a Help Desk application that tracks hours related to working on this mess, you (and other customers) should ask for a reduction in your support costs to compensate for all the non-value added work your internal staff is having to do. Ideally, this sort of clause should be built into a purchase up front, and it would have to start with large customers, but MS (and other vendors) need to face some serious financial consequences for blunders like this...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Every time I hear that software price is only a small consideration in TCO, I wonder where licensing administration goes in that TCO. Be sure to file this one in there too.
I've also never seen acquisition costs for free software, "well I've got a meeting with the vendor this afternoon. we're gonna haggle over the price of 20 seats."
t
So far we've seen:
products which won't work after 30 days until you "activate them" (Win XP, Office XP, Autocad, etc),
games which install fully to your hard-drive but require the CD in to be played,
games which require a CD key to be played online (try playing a second-hand game online!),
games which won't work with certain CD drives thanks to the way the Safedisk copy protection system works,
programs which require you to enter a particular word or phrase from the manual every time you want to use it,
CDs which stop you from making a legal backup copy,
DVDs which only work if you are in a particular region, or use a particular OS, not to mention Macrovision problems
etc etc. Yet the people who pirate products rarely have any of the above mentioned problems. OK, so they have to keep up-to-date with keygens and no-CD patches, but my point is that ordinary consumers are penalised for the crimes of others.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
My mom used to work with a division of IBM and when I heard how large just their NC buildings were, I thought the same thing - wow, now I see where MS makes its money.
Then I wondered about switching to Linux and how much that would *save* them.
I mentioned that to my mom and she said that they discussed it many times, but they ran figures on how much money they spent/lost just switching from one *program* to another (training and help desk support), let alone to a whole new operating system.
She was in the department that hired temps and they used software that scanned in resumes and then fed them to a database and allowed searches on it and such. At the time, I worked for a company that had a superior product to what they had, it was cheaper, and had a better UI. She said in order for them to switch (after they looked into it), due mostly to training, it would add on over $2million in costs to the overall price - and their current system "worked" so they were going to change. And that was just her group which was "only" a few thousand people.
You could argue that were the software easy enough to work with, you wouldn't need to train the users... but if you think that way, you give the users WAY too much credit - something one learns quickly in the software industry - if you are writing software for end users, remember that your end users are fat dumber than you can ever estimate.
Essentially the only way you could switch (easily and cost effectively) over an office is if it were very small, and if the users were already relatively tech savvy.
for the most part, any savings in OS and program cost is lost in productivity lost during the switch and the increased support for people that are essentially all newbies at that point.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
"Our company with approx 80,000 PCs has been hit...."
Maybe if your SysAdmin had spent some time testing the patch first, you wouldn't be in this situation now.
Here's the quick guide:
If your company needs some sysadmins with a clue, I'm sure you can find some over at Kuro5hin.
At my current employer we support MS Office, but we also support various additions to MS Office, Wordperfect, Lotus Notes, Groupwise, Outlook, 20-30 trade specific applications (accounting apps, HR apps, Faxing applications,etc..), 15-20 web applications, and various other random software packages. These other applications need to be trained on and learned by everyone also. Why do people assume the everyone is born with the ability to use MS Office and would struggle more then normal for anything else? 95% of our support calls for MS Office are formatting, numbering pages, inserting symbols, page layout, and TOC, TOA issues. We would get these calls for ANY freaking office package we used. I would say that initally (maybe a month or two) it would be rough but after that is would be business as usual.
I think the the training costs and issues with switching office packages is nothing but FUD. There may be issues with a different office package not working with existing applications or addon's but that is a different issue all together and that is not limited to just office packages.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
The parent poster's The parent poster's company has made its decision. They should deal with it.
I got the impression that is exactly what his/her/it's point exactly was. They locked themselves into software that they only use because "everyone else does". I know I'm in the same boat despite everything I (litterally) prove otherwise. I'm surprised (from time to time) that I haven't got canned yet. I've been told (essentially) that I can't even say the "L" word anymore. OK, fine. I still speak up on alternatives, and also PROVE that they are viable ones (Mozzie, OOo, etc.). It's like talking to a wall, though.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Doesn't have to be online... Remember when Office XP decided to lock out users because the hardware had changed? (Some users had merely swapped a battery for a CD player in a laptop).
The cause of the potential problems in this area when using DRM and online product activation is not the same as the registration thingy in Office 2000, but the result is the same: you are locked out of the product. Tell people about how product activation may lock you out of your own computer or data, and often you get the reply "surely they won't screw up that badly, and surely they wouldn't lock you out completely?". If they tell you that, counter with this example.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
OpenOffice doesn't have an "L" word in it ;-)
I do feel sorry for you about that, though. The Linux users group at my company had to shut down untder the same kind of threat. Funny thing, as they allow internally hosted employee group sites from quilting to fishing to almost anything you can think of, but LINUX, can't have a site for THAT.
From a practical point of view, who verifies the costs? What if I report to Microsoft that my 100 person support team spent two work days dealing with some small bug. And by the way, our support people make $250k/year.
There's definitely a way to implement this in the contract. As with any contract regarding constant service, from rental homes that require repairs to service contracts for air conditioners and heaters, a penalty for lack of service can be required either at a set rate, by percentage, or some other rate that can be proven through evidence instead of the unfounded claims of the client that is demanding a discount. Contracts for small, mid-size, large, and multinational businesses could have different set rates, a small percentage of the cost of the entire deal could be used as a penalty rate for all businesses, etc. The problem, however, is that A) this is not in the contract and Microsoft's clients are thus in no position to demand any sort of refund or penalty fee, B) Microsoft would never allow that sort of contract anyway because they have a de facto monopoly advantage in the workplace, and C) Microsoft would never make that sort of decision because both their older and hastily patched software is so horrifically buggy that they would lose tons of money on such a plan.
The main cost here would not be the licensing, but rather the training until the same level expertise is reached with the new system for the workstation user (lost man hours, actual cost of training etc.) and support costs.
Right (if the licencing costs are not REALLY high.) But the training is once and the support costs are ongoing. Support cost differences quickly dominate once you're over the hump.
[... assume] 100 users need a support staff of 3-5 people [...] The avg. college kid can probably work as an intern in a lot of these when it comes to M$ based solutions, but when you go off into the world of Unices, where people actually need to have a basic understanding of what is happening support costs (and the avg. wage of the staff) would skyrocket
I think you're off on using an intern for support. That misses the added costs incurred when he hits the problems he CAN'T handle correctly - both the added costs of worker/application/business-process downtime while he calls for more trained help and the added costs ditto.
But the BIG thing your analysis missed - which the TCO studies funded by others than Microsoft catch - is the effect of the higher reliability of open-source solutions. This reduces costs two ways:
First: Though you need people who know what they're doing, you need a MUCH SMALLER NUMBER of them, because they put in much less time per-machine.
Second: Because things don't fail as often, your business processes have LESS DOWNTIME. So you get back a LOT of productivity in those hundreds of workers who spend more of their time working and less of it waiting for the helpdesk.
That last factor is another component of why open-source has achieved penetration in servers first. Different functions have different costs of downtime. For a generic worker it varies a lot depending on your particular business and the workers function in it, while the costs accrue in one department and the benefits in another. For a server - especially a business-critical-function server - the costs of downtime are almost always very high, while the server is bought and administered by the same department that handles its maintenance, making all three components of its TCO visible to the same bosses.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If sun knew what was good for them, they would fedex a copy of Star Office with a license allowing the company to use the current version forever for free to every major company that got nailed by this. If any of thouse compaiens took the StarOffice solution, then they would be making a killing on license fees with the next version or else they are out the cost of a fedex packet and a CD. Considering how much sun sends out anyway, it makes me wondering whats going on inside their marketing department... Oh never mind its a marketing department so nothing useful is going on.
That our company has switched over to OpenOffice exclusively. It's been a year since we switched over from Microsoft Office, and there have only had a handful of documents that have had MS Office/Open Office incompatibilities.
Plus, OpenOffice is totally free. Retraining was a non-issue. We told the employees when we switched over that they were welcome to use MS Office, but they would have to buy the software themselves and keep the licenses handy. There were no complaints about switching over after that.
So we can sit back smugly as all of our branches are unaffected and read stories like this without blanching :) If you haven't checked out OpenOffice, I highly recommend that you do.
We hang the petty thieves, but appoint the great ones to public office. - Aesop
People are often not busy with being right or wrong. First they need to feel secure before they can learn new things. Weird but true. If you say that they should use linux, you essentially say they've been wrong big time == insecure feeling.
It is their insecurity that hits you.
nosig today
The parade is to dust that older sign saying "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". Which also has exceptions but hush.
Get the management to contact IBM Services, a branch of Big Blue that make half the revenue of IBM these days. They would be very happy to discuss Linux solutions for the company and will do support as well -- for a price of course.
Then some PHB will notice that since this open source thingy is free and you only pay for service, Joe Schmoe in IT can install and use open source tools if that saves money.... And you win.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Yeah, it's called "synthetic time".
For those of you who don't know how NDS works (and probably don't care), I'll spill some of my useless knowledge on you.
So, let's say you set the clock back on a Novell server. Most NDS transactions are timestamped, to allow auditing, and other such nice things. The problem is, let's say you set your time back now - it's 4/17/03, 12:40pm, and you set it back to 4/17/00, 12:40pm.
NDS isn't exactly *stupid* - it has transactions leading up to 4/17/03, and time very rarely goes backwards like that. So the server is forced to issue "synthetic time", so every transaction takes place a very short ammount of time after 4/17/03, 12:40:0000, then 12:40:00.01, 12:40:00.02, and so on. This will *never fix itself*...
Well, until 4/17/03, 12:40:xx.xx pm, when things catch up. Then everything will be fine.
Never fear! You can fix this. After you roll your clocks back, just run dsrepair with the -a switch (which allows you to do the stupid things - but for the really stupid things, you can use the switches -xk2 -xk3), and pick advanced options -> Global Schema Operations. Log in, and select "Declare a new Epoch."
Then you're just really telling the Novell server, yes, strange as it may seem, time *did* go backwards. And it deals with it.
I really don't know why I bothered to write that.
MS has effectively been able to disable an application suite that has been purchased, based on a date.
It won't take much more for them to figure out how to make it so that its part of an application service pack update.
And how much harder would this be to tie into an OS. Instead of a blue screen of death, you'd get nothing. Heck, imagine trying to boot your system and getting nothing.
Some say MS would never do this, that it would hurt the market too much.
But how many people don't rush out to get the new OS, who stay 2 or more versions behind, who really don't care about upgrading.
The next update you get from MS could render your system inoperable after a few years. ***wisecracks left out***
"Hmm... we need to disable Win2k systems so that we can drive market sales for our next OS we release in 2005."
Microsoft didn't design it to stop working after any amount of time. In a number of countries it is a requirement that products are "registered" (this doesn't affect the UK).
As of April 15th Office 2000 SR1 no longer needs to be registered in those affected countries but it appears that things have gone a bit wrong.
Instead of bashing Microsoft, learn the facts.