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Microsoft Office Genuine Advantage (OGA)
Ant writes "PC World is reporting that Microsoft's Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) program will require mandatory validation of Office software starting October 27 (2006)." From the article: "Similarly, starting in January, users of Office Update will have to validate the legitimacy of their Office software before they can use the service, Microsoft added. Users absolutely hated the first iteration of the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program, and their protests pressured the company into revising it about a year after it launched in July 2005."
Microsoft is just one of the highest-profile examples of a company viewing their customers as criminals (Sony Music also comes to mind). Most of the piracy comes from people who would never buy the products in the first place. Punishing legitimate users won't end piracy and it won't boost sales. What is wrong with these companies? The more Microsoft blocks the use of Office the more likely alternatives will gain stronger position in the market. Which is fine by me, I'm tired of getting simple text documents in doc format.
An anecdote sure, but the old slightly technical guy in my office (fits the stereotype to a T) downloaded OpenOffice after MS Office was disabled on his computer. He had already activated it and registered it, but still had to activate it again to use any of the programs. Not even just update it, to use it at all according to him.
Last week he was a big Microsoft fan, this week he's researching his options.
This is good for open source software, such as openoffice or any competitor of MS. Software piracy helps Microsoft. When people can get the industry leading software for free (illegal copy) they will never consider the alternatives.
Clearly all of you whiney-ass titty-babies don't use your computers to do Real Work. All electronic-design automation (EDA) software uses FlexLM. Lots of high-end audio- and video-editing software uses an iLok key or similar. Yeah, it's all a big pain in the ass (I used to regularly fight with lmgrd) , but when the software costs tens of thousands of dollars per seat, there's a great incentive for vendors to lock it down.
Face it, software activation is here, and here to stay. Get used to it. For the legit user, it's not a problem.
One real issue that vendors need to address is 24/7 availability of support staff so that legit users can get new license keys if a machine dies after hours or on the weekend.
-a
PS: Having said all of that, vendors who charge a fee to move a license from one machine to another need to get their attitudes adjusted.
There are countless reason to upgrade from office 97
"XML support" - noncompliant XML support, you mean.
[anything]"powerpoint"[anything] - I do work on my PC, not create cute slideshows for management meetings.
"more rows in excel" - Because 65k per worksheet has held me back so often?
"outlook spam filtering" - N/A, I use a real email program - Elm.
"sharepoint integration" - Give me a Wiki any day.
"team editing" - The word "team" has no "I" in it. I like it that way.
"task panes" - I know the shortcut keys. Give me my screen back!
"ink support" - My pen has that too, and doesn't suck 150 watts.
"infopath" - I just googled four entirely incompatible description of what that does, and still have no clue.
"onenote" - See "ink".
All these people that say "no reasons to upgrade from office 97" are the same who see no reason to upgrade from Win98 - either they've never tried anything better i.e. the new versions, or have such simple needs that basically anything would satisfy them (like MS works), that's why.
Agreed completely. I use Office XP at work, and have yet to do anything in it that I can't do in Office 97. 10-year old versions of Word and Excel quite simply do what they should, they do it well, and MS hadn't gone too far down the path of bloatware at that point.
As for XP vs 98, I personally came from the NT side of the family, so consider XP quite a lot better than 98 (even better than NT4, though I can't really say it has a whole lot more than Win2k).
Have you even seen or tried Office 2007? Beta 2 is truly amazing.
I don't want my productivity suite to amaze me. I just want it to sit there obediently doing nothing until I want it to work; Then I want it to do its thing and go away, offering me as little "help" as possible. I don't want it to offer to integrate my music collection with my writing style of the moment. I don't want it to take me to a new paradigm of productive collaboration. I don't want my core processes reengineered, I don't want animated help systems, and I don't want my computer to phone any home but my own!
I agree with you. A friend of mine put it so succintly. MS is like McDonalds. They take some one else's idea and mass produce something that just slightly shittier than the original but most people haven't experienced the original so they don't know any better. McDonalds has the the McFlurry (DQ's blizzard), Their 1/4 pounders (BK's 1/4 Pounder's), Salads (Wendy's Salads) ect. MS has done the same with Tabs (Firefox, Netscape), Windows (Mac), plug and play (mac), Window's media player (Winamp anyone?), I'm sure you get the idea. Like McD's the quality sucks, it's not good for you, and for most people it's the first flavour they've had so they go with what they know.
Hee Hee The drinking bird does all the work!
You are exactly right - that is the *exact* calculation that is performed.
I've run the numbers myself, both estimates before the fact and 1-year, and 2-year follow-ups.
It's just simple. Everytime I looked at the numbers it was clearly a 8-to-1 or better ratio. That's 8 lost pirated users for ever lost paying customer.
In this case - I was a consultant on the project - when you consider that users on illegally copied versions of the software generated support requests at a much higher rate than legit users (I know - pirated users calling up and demanding support. These are't people with one extra copy installed; these are people who have never paid, not once, not ever), and also generate the most noise on the support message boards and forums, it was a no-brainer to continue.
An unintended side-effect was that it cut off the "low-hanging fruit" infringers - the ones who bought one license but installed it on any number of machines. These people were in effect cheating the competition who paid appropriately for the software.
Software is a really hard business in general. Especially when you are making a product that is very niche and very vertically integrated. This particular package had a target market of approximately 5,000-6,000 users nationwide, and required quarterly maintenance to keep within regulation and tolerances. Even if every potential user used this package (this company held about 60% of hte share) and licensed things squarely it was a tough business. When you only have about 3000 customers, having a thousand or so who are using the software illictly are a major drain. For this particular company and product keeping the perceived value of the software high in the long run makes great business sense.
Bottom line is that I am sure MS ran the numbers. Losing some share for cutting down on some measure of casual and business infringement was probably well worth it.