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."

Re:Office Update? What's that??

[daeg]

Windows Update is being phased out and will be fully replaced with Microsoft Update, which will be expanded to provide updates for all Microsoft programs. Office updates will then become as routine as operating system ones.

Time for refund

[besenslon]

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.

Home vs. Office

[colinbg]

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.

Google Docs et. al.

[bgfay]

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?

Re:Reversed It?

[Anonymous Coward]

0. Revised, not reversed.
1. AutoPatcher [autopatcher.com]

Re:Just gets easier

[WhiteWolf666]

Yes, actually.

http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/OOo2.x /user_guide2_draft.pdf [openoffice.org]

At a svelt 587 pages, it is exactly 496 pages longer than the Office 2003 Manual, located here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/f/1/0f1d5 b1f-53bc-47c3-bf6f-ac6d67cf9766/Office2003Guide_WP .doc [microsoft.com] .

I know size doesn't count for everything, but still; it's there, it's significantly better than the OEM MS Office manual, and it is accompanied by fantastic community support, including developer feedback.

Re:Just gets easier

[suezz]

here ya go - just takes a little digging

http://www.learnopenoffice.org/CalcTutorial33.htm [learnopenoffice.org]

Re:Customer as criminal

[fermion]

Most people never bought MS products because they were so easy to copy. That is why MS was the machine of choice. Buy the machine, steal the software. I saw many switch from Apple to Wintel as it became clear that on Apple one had to buy software, while on MS WIndows everything could be 'borrowed'.

Now MS is demanding that everything be paid for. How much this is going to effect the market is unclear. Most MS software I have owned has either been paid for by my school or places that I work through the normal licensing process. It seems to me that MS has made these licenses more liberal to increase the amount of legitimate software in the wild.

It is true that false positives are annoying to users, but MS has been annoying users for 20 years, and no one seems to care. As long as they get the stuff done at the end of the day, it is worth it. No real alternative exist in most peoples universe.

I get my work done is OO.org, and it is great. Certain things would be easier in MS Office, but I can't afford the software and don't really want to steal it, and even if I could afford it at this point the risk is too great. What if at some point it does not validate, and I can't get work done? This is one reason I let Eudora and started using Mail, even though Mail is crap is comparison.