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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."
It is getting easier and easier to continue using Open Office is seems...
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.
Aren't you supposed to do user interface research before releasing a product out to the consumers? Why have your customers hate the product tbefore redesigning it to meet their needs?
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.
I don't understand Microsoft. The Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) is actually very easy to defeat, and I'm sure this new OGA will be just as easy. Why irritate customers when the people who intend to use without purchasing it will do so anyway? Did they buy a copy of Sony's playbook titled "How to piss away your loyal customers and then blame them for your lack of growth"?
I really don't get it. Why continue to do something after it's been proven ineffective?
Aero
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
To Open Office- which I will do at home.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Remember, failing to accept your valid, multi-hundred-dollar copy of Office because Microsoft can't produce a product we're willing to pay for is a feature, not a bug.
Be prepared for a reinstall.
If all my base are belong to you and I attempt to retrieve my base, does that mean I'm freebasing?
Yes, users hated it, so they expanded the program to cover other products. Thanks, MS!
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
To read this TPS report you are required to insert blood sample into the slot provided and place your left eye on the scanner.
What I want to know is does this include downloading the updates to Office 2000 and other versions not requiring activation?
liqbase
The joke's on Microsoft. Exactly how many people use Online templates or Office Update? Compared to people who use Windows Update, I'm guessing not that many. And of those people who do use Office Update *and* don't have a legit copy of Office, how many of them are savvy enough to *ahem* figure out/find a way around the mandatory OGA?
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.
...To never, ever upgrade from Office 97.
Seriously... The more companies make the old or cracked versions of their products more useful than the latest-n'-greatest, the less right they have to whine about illegal copying and decreased sales.
Whether we talk about DVDs or WGA or software that phones home, people just want to use what they own (and spare me the BS about licensing-vs-owning). Making that harder will eventually drive people to the competition, up to and including piracy.
Like many things that headline slashdot, will the layperson notice, or really even care?
Similes are like metaphors
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.
You mean all those worthless Office Online Templates will be unavailable to users with non-validated copies (*cough* er...pirated) of Microsoft Office?
Oh my what a blow to the software piracy market . . .
/* somewhat functional - fix later */
I think that WGA and now OGA are the first step down the slippery slope towards subscription based software. Valve's Steam already requires activation of products over the Internet and automatically updates the software as well and it has been very successful in frustrating copyright infringers. If Word was patched automatically everytime a new bug was discovered like Steam then OGA all-in-all wouldn't be that bad. Why (W|O)GA causes uproar is that you may experience a denial-of-service on your own software. If you're a pirate then too bad - go get OpenOffice, once ODF emerges you won't care about Microsoft Office anyway. But if you're a business then the "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." principle kicks in - and sheeple buy what everyone else is using which at the moment is Microsoft Office. Don't get me wrong, Microsoft Office is really nice and all but once Open Document Format get's added then there is no problem of lock-in anymore - you'll buy your last version of Word to export your information into ODF and never look back.
Shh.
Come closer, little Microsoft Genuine Advantage. Don't worry, I won't hurt you.
You're just so cute!
I think I will call you, Mini-DRM, because you're unwanted, intrusive, and I keep tripping over you while trying to use my legitimately purchased WinVista PCs!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Coming soon:
PC World is reporting that Microsoft's Notepad Genuine Advantage (NGA) program will require mandatory validation of Notepad.exe starting [insert happy date here]"
And the reason is that 90% of the current "pirates" would *not purchase what they're using but switch to a free (as in good) alternative.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I work at a fairly large chain that sells, amongst other things, computers. None of these PCs come with Word or Office, rather they come with Works. I explain that Works may do what they want. I explain how much Office is, and sometimes I mention you can get Open Office for free, since I don't realistically think many people are going to lay out the cash in store for the software. Know what they say typically? 'I know someone who's got office, I can get them to copy it for free.' I used to mention product validation but now I just don't bother. It's just they know Word and Office and that's what they want, by hook or by crook.
Microsoft announced Microsoft Mouse Genuine Advantage (MMGA), as a mandatory update that benefits users of genuine Microsoft mice. If mouse is found to be non-genuine, MMGA will replace X and Y coordinates in mouse driver, and subtly notify user.
The more the Evil Empire irritates its users, the more opportunity arises for other vendors.
Remember when using MS office was the path of least resistance?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Indeed. It is like software companies don't understand that a little piracy supports their dominance. Just like giving away software to schools actually helps "indoctrinate" new users.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
As usual on /.: Does it run on linux?
Jokes aside - but MS Office is a separate product. I may buy it and run it under wine. If OGA stops updates for wine users, MS may face some other (legal) problems.
--
Even the most advanced equipment in the hands of the ignorant is just a pile of scrap.
I use M$ office at the office and at home, however, I will not pay the inflated prices for the suite at home, this just will give me the incentive to use open office at home, which when I get used to it, will make it easy to switch over to at the office. M$ is just shooting themselves in the foot here. I cannot be the only one who will do this now. Thier software is not worth that pricetag.
Clever or not, I got nothing...
What do you do when your cat likes to play with water?
Duh. Post it on teh intertubes. *cough!*
I know that online office apps are nowhere near as functional as Office/OpenOffice/WordPerfect, but that doesn't matter much to me. I'm a teacher and just today switched all of my students to Google Docs (we all have Gmail accounts because the school system doesn't need to pay for the same service). We were using OpenOffice (because it's free and students could legally install it from the discs I provided), but Google Docs is easier, cheaper for us, and does what we need it to do.
Are there features missing? You bet there are. But with Firefox 2.0 we now have real-time spellchecking, and I imagine that the features are going to grow as we go. For now, it does nearly everything that we need to do and if we don't, we can just shift to OpenOffice for that task and then move back to Google Docs for the rest of it.
What I'm saying is that, for us, in our school, MS Office is unnecessary. We can't be the only ones.
Doesn't that signal a problem for a company that makes tremendous amounts of money on the product?
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Or maybe MS likes pissing of it's customers...nah that can't be it!
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
Since Microsoft's Office revenue overwhelmingly comes from big business site license and volume contracts that won't be affected by OGA (and weren't by WGA either), Joe Windows and Small Company will put up with it because they don't have the pull Super Corporation has with Microsoft.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I caught 'Microsoft Update' a while back in one of their feature roll outs. IE loads the page 'http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate/v6/de fault.aspx?ln=en-us', when I click the super special Microsoft Update icon. Which by the way is different from the windows update icon.
*aside* I'd like to thank Firefox 2.0 for allowing me to post here without spelling mistakes. Thanks to FF I can now speak learnedly.
Granted, if Microsoft had engineered their software and their business model differently, draconian measures such as WGA and OGA might not be necessary, but that's not how it is. While some problems may arise (suspension of valid site licenses which have been hacked, for example), the fact is that I know of no businesses and very few individual users who view WGA/OGA as anything more than a mild inconvenience, at worst.
Now, why anybody would choose (for example) MS Office over OpenOffice is beyond me - in any dollars for functionality comparison I can think of, OpenOffice is a guaranteed winner; and rare indeed is the office that needs functionalities which OpenOffice doesn't provide as well as MS Office.
Let 2/3rds of the Office users on the planet be using pirated versions of office. If MS Office market share disappears overnight after they start mandating this, I'll never ask for anything ever again! And I mean it this time!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
No, seriously. At this point who really cares if Microsoft makes it even harder to legally use their products. The pirates wil just get around the problem the next day. Its us people that are trying to support a company that suffer. Pissed off customers will look elsewhere for their IT solutions.
I stopped using their garbage at home long long ago, and NEVER recommend their products. Even when it means an extra hoop for the customer to jump thru, its still a better deal in the long run to 'just say no' to the empire and their ludicrous actions of late..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Reversed it? I just recently had to download it to even get to the update screen. WTF? It's not reversed, it's still there.
So, this leaves two questions:
1. How can you get the updates without having to download WGA?
2. Anybody know how I can get rid of it?
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
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.
Could anything more plainly prove that if you want access to your OWN data, you'd better not use any proprietary tool to create/store it -- especially not Microsoft.
First they'll lock you out of the O/S; then they'll lock you out of the tools.
"Nice lot of data you have there. Be a shame if anything happened to it..."
you had me at #!
> I'd like to thank Firefox 2.0 for allowing me to post here without spelling mistakes. Thanks to FF I can now speak learnedly.
;)
Well, at the very least with more deftly polished ignorance...
My wife is going to Wazzu (WSU). She uses, Word, Excel, PowerPoint... all the time. I ask her if she can use Linux and/or OO but she says they only support Windows & MS Office. I know OO has just about everything MS office has (PP?) but it's hard enough learning all there is to know about the MS products. Trying to learn all the little (and maybe big) differences with OO would be all the harder. I don't know how well continually switching between the 2 on a given project would work? I don't need to give her MORE to complain about :)
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
MS owns the OS market because it owns the office applications market. It's the exchange of documents that forces corporations and institutions to standardize on MS Windows and MS Office, not the Windows operating system. MS's control of the office applications market depends on that everyone (that matters) uses MS Office. It's a vicious circle. That's why forcing people to pay up or switch may hurt MS, as it may actually create groups of users of alternative software suits large enough to give those solutions momentum and turn them into more valid choices for organizations. It might become so that compatibility with non-MS office software becomes an actual business demand, and then the MS monopoly is fried, as it must mean the end of their user lock-in strategy. MS may not make money from pirate copies of MS Office, but as long as everyone uses it, everyone has to use it, whether everyone pays for it or not.
Look at it from MS's perspective. They have millions of poeple stealing their software. Granated, its over priced and may not be worth it... but a high price tag doesn't warrant stealing. Should a company who's software is in this great of demand really rely on society to use the "honor system"... as in, I'll pay for each additonal install... no need to track it, "i'm honest."
Then again, its just such an irritant to screw around with genuine advantage, but I'm just not sure what other realistic options they have? I do belive ANY software company has the right to protect their products from being stolen.
Simple as that. They get to capture revenue in the millions from many users easily.
Look at it like a noose. Right now, the noose is loose. 3-5 years, along with Vista's set-top-box OS, the noose will be much tighter.
Now is a great time to switch.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The egg. Dinosaurs laid eggs much before there ever was a single hen.
Now, if you say "those were not hen eggs, I shall agree with you on that too, and therefore ask you what you call an hen egg ? An egg which is laid by a hen ? In that case, according to your definition, the hen came first, whatever where it came from (let us say a "protohen"). Or would you define it as a something that can give birth (after some infancy process) to a hen ? In that case, the converse will be true. The choice is yours :-)
Okay, that does not help to solve the Microsoft problem, but as I am only using OpenOffice, I shall not mind a bit :-D
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
You're just unfortunate that your work requires really expensive software in a niche market, so there's little incentive for a random hacker to fix it, and few people with appropriate skills of those who use the software to fix it. A majority of people use Windows and Office, and a lot of them will be inconvenienced - at least some of them have the abilities to fix the software, and others will be important enough to have their complaints listened to.
When enough people have had the experience of not being able to do their work because of WGA/OGA activation errors, alternatives or hacks will appear. If enough businesses lose money because of lost work due either to activation errors or because someone figures out how to hose W/OGA and deactivate a million boxes at once, MS will have a problem. Note that in either of the last two cases, the presence of activation is a problem for legit users.
When cracked software is more useful than software out of the box (assuming, as likely, that activation can be hacked), the incentive to pirate (or to create an alternative) goes up, not down.
The unpopularity of activation, the large market (with the ability to come up with alternatives), and the likely presence of pirated software more useful than the originals means that either activation or MS will go away.
The favorite meme of Bill Gates: "software piracy gobbles up the majority of the industry's theoretical income!"
But from Microsoft's behavior, you wouldn't have thought he believed it. In fact, MS seemed aware of piracy and how to take Advantage of it. Office has always been overpriced and massively pirated by consumers. However, the specter of grueling, embarrassing license audits kept businesses honest. So, while employees pirated and grew familiar with Office at home, their employers were wedged into buying it.
Office Genuine Annoyance obliterates this dynamic; few have $799 to spend on intangible bloatware for their home PC. So, was Microsoft even aware that the piracy dynamic worked strongly to their advantage? Perhaps they were ignorant of it. Perhaps they were but eventually fell for their own line. Or perhaps they were aware of it but now see an alternative - knowing that consumers will not pony up for the full retail Office, do they hope to push everyone into paying ever higher monthly fees instead? IBM would have an easier time returning to a rental-only hardware sales model. After the cable bill, the phone bill, the electric bill, the mortgage and the car payment, who has $15 a month for Microsoft?
So, you have $15 a month for Microsoft, eh? That's good, because the features you want are only available in the full retail version! Oh, snap. Better start saving.
The Office suite used to have a nice set of manuals. Back when 3.11 for Workgroups was hot, the office suite came with a 1-2" thick manuals for Microsoft Word, Excel, Money, etc.
Problem is that they're expensive to print, nobody read them, and nobody missed them.
DATABASE WOW WOW
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
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!
The article mentions: "...any Office Online templates downloaded from within the Office 2007 Microsoft Office System applications will require validation of legitimacy." So I assume this covers Office 2003 (since OGA starts October 27th and Office 2007 isn't even out yet). But does this OGA cover Office 97 and XP as well?
I'm in the process of converting our entire network to OpenOffice. Apart from a few administrators who need to run MS Office, everyone will be on OO by the end of next year.
Have you used the newest version of OpenOffice lately? It is very nice. The suite has vastly improved in the last couple of years.
As a bonus, the OO experience is exactly the same on the Mac. MS office operates differently on the PC than it does on the Mac. This from a company that tries to force developers into the same "windows user experience" model.
As a long time Microsoft advocate and user, I just laugh...the more MS clamps down on the average user, the further MS pushes them away. The alternatives are getting quite compelling.
-ted
Why don't they just finish the exclamation off: OGAWD!!!
microsoft wants all of you users that bring the cd from work and install it on your computer to pay up -
sure we will throw works to the home user along with the teacher and student edition but corporations get screwed and pay the full price.
corporations are brain dead and just accept it the cost of doing business it doesn't have anything to do with the best bang for the buck -
open office is better that microsoft office and I highly recommend home users to install it and then demand it at your office.
I can't believe the price the corporations pay for microsoft crap software when there is a better free alternative.
plus open office will save you documents in an ISO industry standard format that will guarantee YOU will have access to YOUR documents for as long as you want.
microsoft office can't promise you that.
M$ had a cdkey retention assocaited with my email address. I got the beta before they made it pay $1.50 to get it and had a crash and I'm not going to pay them so I can test a product that I should already have a legit key for..
The crafty buggers, they're betting against their own stock (puts? calls? shorting? something like that!) and manipulating the company into outright collapse! First they've made a bajillion bucks on the stock going up, now they'll make another bajillion as the stock drops!
Ya just can't beat a billionaire.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Just this morning I received an email from a coworker which, after detailing the problem at hand, stated "see the attached document". Guess what was in the attached Word document?
The entire text of the email. Verbatim.
I kid you not.
WGA doesn't meet the needs of any customers, it only meets the needs of Microsoft.
actually - yes I knew it existed but I don't go there. Never remember. but I religiously go to windowsupdate. NO person around here new it existed. So on several levels (and yes I know this is said elsewhere) WHO CARES???????????/
if it becomes to much overhead then go to OpenOffice. What's the problem?
(oh that spell check in FF is so cool)
It's one of the most Orwellian concepts I've come across in the software industry. It's a genuine DISadvantage.
Software Ownership doubleplusungood. Rectify: Microsoft ownership by minitrue goodthink: "Genuine Advantage".
I hate MS when they pull this kind of crap. They need to go down.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
.. it's renamed OGPITA
-- All your bass are below two Hz
Keep on an older version of Microsoft Office ;-)
that they can promote their web office more easily.
Am I supposed to hear a rant from Googleplex in next few weeks?
The main reason WGA "works" (ahem) is because users needed to use Windows update to patch bugs/security fixes/getting the new Service Packs.
Problem with OGA is...does anyone bother to update their version of Office? All that has to be done is download a copy of Office, crack it with the included crack, use it, and don't upgrade (there's probably a few hidden steps in there like block Office traffic with firewall and don't use Outlook).
This has been in the hopper since pre 1.0. But Calc still hasn't implemented basic useability functions that were present in Visicalc and every spreadsheet since. Meaning that spreadsheet power users can't easily start formulas with the numeric keypad.
Not quite right. In this case, the "victim" is the OS — which has had plenty of time to come good with security — not the customer directly.
The customer becomes the victim when the service people bill them for the time their defenceless machine chewed up getting fixed. And what else can the service-people do? Run a charity for MS OSes?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The article doesn't make it clear (at all) what version of Office is being talked about. It says:
"After that date, any Office Online templates downloaded from within the Office 2007 Microsoft Office System applications will require validation of legitimacy."
So, erm, just use a version lower than 2007, or what are we saying here?
"Office Update will have to validate the legitimacy of their Office software before they can use the service"
And how is that different - really - from Office Update asking you for valid installation media as it has always done?
Sloppy article. And tech journos complain when they are wrongly described as lazy idiots?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Linux just won't do what windows will. Tons of popular apps just won't work on Linux. Lots of popular hardware also.
I'm telling you, the only thing keeping Windows on my PC is Jobs not releasing OSX for the PC. If OSX x86 ever became an official product that I could install on my own DIY PC MS could kiss my ass goodbye forever. I can't imagine I am the only one who feels this way....
OpenOffice.org's 'Genuwine Advantage' is that you don't actually have to be Microsoft's bitch to use a word processor...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Is Microsoft Office Genuine (dis)Advantage going to flag Wine/Crossover Office users as legit, or illegitimate? Will Codeweavers be sued into oblivion by Microsoft if they work around it? Inquiring minds want to know!
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
I'm just curious how they are going to handle site licensed places like our network. We just buy license seats from a reseller. Our copies aren't individually licensed.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming