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Is Microsoft Office Adware?
An anonymous reader writes "Office may fall under Microsoft's own definition of adware. It links to third-party commercial add-ons, includes up-selling promos, requires cookies for certain functions, and collects technical information. While this is like a normal day on the web, should the commercial office suite be held to a different standard and possibly be considered adware? The article also notes that clicking advertising links in Office will bring up Internet Explorer, regardless of whether or not it is the default browser. We discussed Microsoft's decision to turn Works into adware a few months ago.
SMOKE MARLBORO!!!
I think I've realized something about Microsoft: They really want us to NOT want to use Microsoft products. I finally get it -- It's not sufficient for them to own the market; in order to feel fully dominant, they must own it against our will. It's as though they think that if we wanted to use their products because they were good for us and worked in our best interest, it would not be true show of their power, for we'd be rational in wanting such products. Only if they can force their software down our throats whether we want it or not, do they have full assurance that their power is real.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I got a free copy of Office 2007 Pro from the "Power Together" Vista + Office giveaway. Haven't noticed any ads anywhere, it sure doesn't meet my definition of ad ware.
Is Microsoft Office Adware?
Of course not - If so, Windows Defender would block it. Which it doesn't. So no problem, right?
Slow day, eh?
This is the low-end PC market. Knocking $40 off the manufacturer's build costs is probably major for them in this market. I know, Open Office, etc, but Works 7 (the last one I've seen) is actually pretty decent for what most people use, and the naive user who's buying these PCs just knows "Microsoft" for "Officey" stuff.
I would have been glad to get a free shrink wrap Works a few years ago. My mom was sending me documents in Works Word Processor format and I had to go buy Works to read them. Trust me, teaching "Save As . . . scroll down to Word... " wasn't practical with her at the time. It was a lot less painful to just go buy Works.
Finally, I hate to tell you, but the Works 7 Word Processor isn't actually that bad. It looks exactly like Word did a few years ago, and has all the features most people use.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Wouldn't Windows fall under adware? Looking at the checklist it seems like they all apply... Especially Vista.
:(
On a side note, when I click on an email address in my Windows Mail, it opens Office Outlook. No, it is not set as my default mailer
I could be wrong here (haven't used MS on my home comp for ages) but I thought that the adware problem was with MS Works, which is distict from MS office?
Well,the google ads on the article site point to some adware removers, maybe one of them will help...
Visit ssjx.co.uk
I read it as "Badware". My ad.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...Leopard to be adware as well. My copy came with links to iDisk/.mac and trial versions of iWorks with a few files that default to opening in Pages to get you hooked. While I can get rid of iWeb and iWorks, I cannot get rid of the iDisk link in the connect to menu item. Now that I think of it, iTunes is part of this whole adware strategy as well. Then there's Quicktime. Don't have the Pro version? Apple is going to tell you what you're missing in the menus by ghosting list items and putting a "Pro" tag next to everything. Personally I find this far more deplorable then a few links in what amounts to nothing more than an interactive/context sensitive help "palette". While many rabid anti-MS geeks on Slashdot might not find these links very helpful, some typical office workers will (and I'm sure Microsoft has the user studies to back this position up, unlike the typical Slashbot that has only anecdotal evidence they like to compare to actual data).
Sure, why not? I have been using Microsoft TechNet for a while now, and I kept getting these pop-ip prompts to install something called "Silverlight" just about every time. I have to use TechNet to do my job, so I finally just relented and hit the "OK" button.
Maybe Microsoft should come up with a new logo program: "Microsoft adware Aware"
Oh Lawdy! MS Office must be adware. I better go get myself a shitty office suite like OO.org.
Get fucking serious people. Isn't this the very definition of FUD that is preached about on this site day in and day out, and is almost exclusively used in reference to Microsoft?
Also uses I.E. when Firefox is the default (in win2k at least)
It drives me nuts because my boss *always* uses that instead of clicking the FF icon which is hindering my attempts to improve the workflow.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
NO NO
EMACS forever
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
MS sees the handwriting on the wall.
Warren Buffett saw it back in the early 90s when he said he wouldn't invest in Microsoft, because he didn't see a profitable business model (long term...Buffett's method).
Desperation is driving MS to use everything they can to continue the profit line, including using acquisitions to get what they couldn't create.
I don't have anything bad to say about MS, and use some of their products, but given their CEO's reputation and his lack of experience in any other large company, & changing FOSS world, I have this gut feel that says MS is going to have a REAL HARD time expanding its yearly sales and profits.
An OpenOffice advocacy site talking shit about Microsoft Office? Didn't see that one coming. But I guess Slashdot just has to get their Two Minutes Hate from somewhere...
Of course if this were a Microsoft Office advocacy site talking shit about OpenOffice we would have the FUD-Nazis screaming at the top of their lungs.
But honestly, I can't make myself care about the hypocrisy anymore; I am tired and bored of it even more than I am tired and bored of the whole Roger Clemens thing.
Back on-topic for a second, "adware" is not really a useful term as it encompasses a number of different things, some of which are not malicious and others which are. As long as Microsoft discloses what the software is doing then there really isn't any malicious intent.
EMACS sucks monkey-balls...., Real MEN use VI. http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/real_programmers.png
this is possibly the most incendiary, blatant attempt at microsoft-bashing that ive seen on slashdot. i mean... come on...
FYI: I don't know what you guys are talking about half the time.
And you had better have a passport, because on entrance you and your computer become subjects of El Presidente Señor Lanzero de Sillónes Ballmero.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
..is Intuit. Each year if you upgrade your Quickbooks, Intuit spends more effect and intrusiveness trying to up sell you on features and services related to their software. It has become so infuriating that I refuse to upgrade until I have no choice at all, in hopes someone will come up with something better that is functional enough to make me happy.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Next up: "Does Microsoft kill baby seals or just cute puppies?"
Where's the yesnomaybe tag?
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Guess one of the Mods is a Emacs user, tough luck dude.
But please, this is a classic flame war so please FLAME ON!!!!
They're looking at Office 2003, when the latest version of Office is 2007. In 2007, Firefox loaded every time I went to a link, whether in Office, via an Office dialog, or through Office help.
The article states, "it is unusual to require cookies or to use them in a desktop application", yet Office Online is the only part of Office that requires cookies. This doesn't seem that strange to me: no local features require them.
I wasn't able to find any ads in Office 2007, but because I'm running the latest version, none will probably show up until the next version of Office is released. Showing a couple of ad links at the bottom of the help text, and only after the user goes into help, stretches the definition of Adware a bit.
Simple answer, amigos. Do Not Use.
OOo and works, KOffice and Star Office can all read and save MS office files. If you are genuinely concerned, just don't use MS office. If you're @ work, why bother? It's your employer's problem and not yours.
I gotta note here that when I was installing the latest Java SDK a while back, the installer had a banner ad for OpenOffice.org. I have seen some of the described adware behavior in Office 2007 - most notably, it linked me to an official PDF converter at one point - but that was somewhat less blatant than the OOo one.
--- Bwah?
if Microsoft doesn't do something about these software fractions, there is no way they will ever become number one in office suites. Windows ME, Windows 2000? Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger, Windows Live Messenger? Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works? Rover, Clippy? People will become so confused they will evenutally just switch to Linux in frustration and disgust. Two days later they have a brain hemorrhage an die.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Ad-ware doesn't cost $300.
Office 2007 is basically an advertisement for the not-free Sharepoint, whatever it's called this week.
Users can't find things that the need to do, but they do discover all of these new and wonderous features.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Almost everything Microsoft does makes a whole lot of more sense if you look at it from the standpoint that they hate their customers, but still want their money. I have never worked with products that exude more of a sense of contempt than those from Microsoft, and Vista is possibly the best example.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
It's expensive adware.
For years and years Microsoft has justified the increasing bloat in Office as adding features that customers want. And, now, the latest feature added to Office admits that there are additional things that people want in Office and offers to sell it to them.
This makes my head hurt!
REAL men use butterflies!
if it fits the definition then it is adware. This should be added to spybot's list immediately so everyone can know what kind of crap Micro$oft is putting on there computer
Perhaps the manufacture should just give a genuine itemized invoice rather than bundling and let the market decide.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Desperation is driving MS to use everything they can to continue the profit line
I have this gut feel that says MS is going to have a REAL HARD time expanding its yearly sales and profits.
67 cents of every new retail dollar spent on PC software goes to MS Office.
Through end of November, U.S. retail PC software sales are up 10.3 percent year over year as measured in dollar volume, according to NPD. By comparison, Office sales are up 50.7 percent, by the same measure and in the same time frame. Office sales are so big, they make calculating broader PC software retail sales difficult. The "magnitude of Office sales relative to the rest of the PC software market is phenomenal. It's the massively huge tail wagging the dog." Retail Black Friday sales of Mac Office were up 215.8 percent year over year. While Mac Office generated blowout sales on Black Friday, Office 2007 sales growth was exceptionally good, too. Year-over-year U.S. retail Black Friday sales of Office were up 65.8 percent, as measured in dollars. The Year of Office 2007
Microsoft's profits are up 79%:
For the quarter that ended Dec. 31, profit rose to $4.71 billion, or 50 cents per share, from $2.63 billion, or 26 cents per share the previous year. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had forecast a profit of 46 cents per share. Revenue rose 31 percent to $16.37 billion from $12.5 billion in the year-ago quarter, ahead of the analysts' prediction of $15.95 billion in sales.
{and, in what must be the understatement of the year]
"It looks like a very nice report," said Sarah Friar, an analyst for Goldman Sachs. Microsoft Corp. earnings leap 79 percent
I was sorely tempted to give my response a flamebait title like "The Geek Turns Delusional."
I won't disguise my opinion here that the Geek's increasingly frantic retreat from reality has been the Slashdot story since the posting of Microsoft's second quarter results.
The CDW poll points to a softening of enterprise IT negative attitudes toward Vista. Familiarity, it seems, has bred content: IT departments are happier with Vista's features, particularly in the area of security, and less concerned about the hardware costs of Vista than they were a year ago. Another year will bring further declines in the relative cost of PC hardware -- and make a lot of corporate desktop hardware look even more antique. Only a major economic downturn would be likely to derail current estimates of another strong year for PC sales, so even if Vista remains tied to hardware sales it would do well, and corporate upgrades could finally kick in as old hardware is upgraded. This has been a year when Vista has had its rough edges knocked off, and the marketplace has adjusted its expectations. By Vista's next birthday it should be more differentiated and acceptable for both its consumer and business marketplaces. Assessing Windows Vista On Its First Anniversary
I opened up Word 2007. Typed in a URL. Right clicked, selected "Open Hyperlink" and you know what?
It opened in Firefox. Once again, Slashdot hasn't verified the info they decide to publish. Perhaps it opens IE for some people - I'm using Vista, so maybe the URL handler has a subtle difference to XP. In any case, the article is still flawed.
At first I thought you meant Microsoft's hypocrisy: that they sell you their expensive software and then once it's installed, act like you need to pay them again. Or that with one hand they (anti-competitively) bundle Winodws Defender to keep crap off your computer and with the other hand they put crap back on your computer. Or that their software might be (on YOUR computer) the kernel you run and trust and hope is fair and disinterested; and then it turns out the same company's software has a great interest in an agenda that involves you spending money. There's lots of hypocrisy going on here.
So I nodded and skimmed on --
The I realized you maybe meant Slashdot's "hypocrisy" for "talking shit about Microsoft Office," as if this is an Open Office advocacy site, which would be a very boring site. Good heavens, don't you even know what "talking shit" means? It means substanceless accusations. Feeding ads to a captive, paying audience is a substantial accusation. If you have some dirt on OO.o then out with it, we are interested. (And we'll fix it -- because we can, we have the source.) And hypocrisy means holding a double standard, or acting -- but criticizing expensive bloatware when free alternatives exist is a perfectly coherent, unified standard.
The Microsoft Shill factor on Slashdot is annoying. We should call it "astrocrabgrass" or something; I speculate you are part of it, AC. Then again maybe you're just a troll and I bit, in which case congratulations.
$META_SIG_JOKE
He used the integrated search (which is very cool BTW, you can hook it to just about ANY web service that has a documented signature, so if you want it to hook into your custom intranet CMS running PHP, just publish an interface via SOAP...) to search office online. OH NO, THE OFFICE ONLINE WEBSITE HAS PAID ADS!
What if he added google to that dropdown (it may be there by default, was on mine, but perhaps it picked up my vista search preferences?) and searched for "MLA". Would GOOGLE *GASP* have given him results that were links to commercial products?
they hate their licensees
There, fixed it for ya. The term "customer" leaves me with the impression that you've actually bought something and you can do want you want with it. I don't think this is how M$ sees it. Bill lets you use his s/w for a while if you behave and follow the rules.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
In Microsoft Office Professional 2003's help, a search for "APA" (a popular documentation style) brings up two links labeled Microsoft Office Marketplace.
The ads don't appear in the app itself, but these days the online support is tightly coupled with the application. It's like ads in textbooks. If MS is that desperate for revenue they have to embed ads in their online help, then they're in worse shape than I thought. It's just tacky and slightly pathetic.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Man, cite someone with some actual skills in this field next time: That Jeremy Reimer character won't cut it, per his showing here:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=41095&cpage=216
Jeremy Reimer is just bad news, literally and figureatively speaking, and is nothing more than a troublemaker online. He caused himself and his website (arstechnica) all kinds of trouble, as well as his fellow arstechnica person in Mr. Jay Little.
I gave up on Office after 2k3. I got tired of having to install Service Packs to plug all the security holes they'd integrated so deeply within the software itself. Now I support OOo. I am incredibly thankful for FOSS. No service packs and a smaller install footprint!
You must be new. That's what we do around here...pointless debate.
Their stuff is what they're making over there. See, not so hard. And no, it's no excuse if english isn't your first language. We all have c/c++/java/perl/cobol or whatever as our first language. Now I'm just hoping that someone will find grizzly errors in my pedantic rant.
Wouldn't be the first time that MS has released technical documentation and guidelines, then proceeded to ignore them. I remember reading msdn guidelines on the use of the API controlling the damn XP lower-right corner popups. It urged developers to remember that every time they use it, they are interrupting the user from another task, so they should only use it to communicate urgent system information rather than nag the crap out of them. Shortly afterwards I was asked once again by my system to "Help make office better".
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Jeremy Reimer is just bad news, literally and figureatively speaking, and is nothing more than a troublemaker online. He caused himself and his website (arstechnica) all kinds of trouble, as well as his fellow arstechnica person in Mr. Jay Little.
Umm, you're Alexander Peter Kowalski aka APK aren't you?
I can see why you hate Reimer though -
http://www.jeremyreimer.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=4128
Too start with it was quite funny, but I actually ended up feeling sorry for you.
You're (in)famous at arstechica too -
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/34709834/m/8510980933?r=3650926043#3650926043
And Jay Little wrote this creepy little article about how much he hates you -
http://www.jaylittle.com/jaylittle/default.aspx?cmd=article&sub=display&id=30
Seriously dude, you're mad and they're evil to torement you. Seek pschiatric help. And stop linking to that windowsitpro thread, it makes you look like a nutter.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
REAL MEN set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain the disk with the data they want.
Thanks for the correction.
Actually, thinking about it, it's not even how you describe it. You give control of your computer to Microsoft, they allow you to use the computer with Windows. While their software is on it, while you might have physical possession of the computer, it is theirs to do with as they see fit, and any functionality and value you get out of it is solely at their discretion.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
meow
Isn't there an Emacs command that does that?
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
I apologize if it was just me unable to detect the sarcasm.
C-q-[butterfly] key
it's right next to the [any] key
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
And you had better have a passport...
You mean Live ID, right?
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
Does it seem that Microsoft is leveraging their dominance on the desktop again? Though this feature is only available to their newer versions of Office, it does seem to me that there is a whole reservoir of advertising dollars witing to be tapped by them. I can't wait for the day when I will be entertained and distracted to death by them turing their entire platform into one huge digital billboard. As it is, I have the attention span of a mosquito since the web came to be. On the bright side, perhaps they will give away their whole platform for free and whilst at the same time providing me with imaginative excuses for not having turned in my book report.
life is all about searching and sorting
I found this post to be quite interesting in an odd way... Specifically, it occurs to me that technically minded people frequently get annoyed with technopesants who can't follow a "simple" list of instructions, so it does actually make sense that a company populated by people from that same background would write software that 'returns the favour' by treating the user like a retarded monkey.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
He may be smart and rich, but the guy has several screws loose.
Almost all CEOs are primarily salesmen. Ballmer is more of a loud-mouth bully, he demands constant attention, he always has something to prove, he lives to hurt those who he sees as being weaker than him.
This whole article is ridiculous. I know Slashdot (or at least it's readers) are somewhat biased when it comes to Microsoft, but did you seriously expect anything less than a one-sided "OMG M$ is SO adware" discussion on an article that is nothing but flaimbait itself?
I always expect the scale to be a little unbalanced here when it comes to MS vs. [Insert open source alternative here], but this is stupid. By this standard, any software with a link to an external site is the same. Leopard's no better when it comes to this stuff.
Why not have a discussion on "Was slavery really bad?" or "Was Hitler really evil?". Those conversations would be just as one-sided.
/rant
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion