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Office 2003 Bug Locks Owners Out
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Microsoft Office 2003 bug is locking people out of their own files, specifically those protected with Microsoft's Rights Management Service. Microsoft has a TechNet bulletin on the issue with a fix. It looks like they screwed up and let a certificate expire. There's no information on when the replacement certificate will expire, though, or what will happen when it does."
Actually, it's not really a bug, just the usual friendly reminder from Microsoft that there's a new version out and it's time to ante up again.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I know a LOT of people still using MS Office 2003. Some people dislike the Ribbon System with '07's version. Some people are too cheap to upgrade when the old copy still "works".
That's why there's OpenOffice. An experience that brings you back to the good 'ol days of Office 2003 for free. Actually, it may even bring you back to the days of Office '97.
At least until the next version comes out. Then you have the ribbon too. God, I hope it can be disabled.
There's no place like
Why did you put "works" in quotes? Office 2003 still does, in fact, work. It works just fine.
A lot of people are still using Office 2003 because the number of new features that impact daily usage seems to shrink with every new release. Why upgrade when the version you have does everything you need it to, and the new version doesn't do anything you wish it did?
There's always someone who will benefit from [insert new feature here]. But for the rest of us, Office has suffered from a paucity of innovation since 1995. If anything, things have gotten worse -- e.g. they keep trying to make Microsoft Word "smart," but the result is a program that's too smart to be obedient and too stupid to do what you actually want it to do.
The writing's on the wall for Office. If the folks in Redmond don't figure out something reeeal soon, Office is toast.
Microsoft gets people to update by giving their product to the CEOs and "bigwigs". When everybody _else_ in the organization cannot read or use the new format for the documents, they have to keep bouncing transfered documents back to the aforementioned bigwigs. Eventually the bigwigs get tired of the fact that they cannot understand how to use save-as-older-format, and they dislike having their underlings telling them to do things, and they cannot bear to find all the files they saved and re-save them before they downgrade back to the old version... So the entire company naturally has to pay to upgrade everyone.
Repeat that at the border of the company. Every iteration of Little Company that works with and is dependent on Big Company, cannot allow themselves to be seen as unhelpful nor out of date, and they cannot bounce the documents they receive via email etc. without giving that exact impression...
Letting certificates expire is _not_ a Microsoft "strategy", it's an artifact of their adoption of "We don't care. We don't have to. We're The Phone Company" where there is no longer just one phone company, but Microsoft wants to be "The Software Company".
This _is_ egg on their face, but the only ones who will not yell "brilliant omelet" are the people who can connect the "Trusted Computing" dots. Letting the world _again_ see what it means to leave the keys to your property in the hands of any entity that doesn't _have_ to care is just another Microwhoops...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press