Microsoft Cracking Down on Illegal Office users
An online report confirms that Microsoft’s ‘Windows Genuine Advantage’ program for Microsoft Office, creatively titled the ‘Office Genuine Advantage’ program or OGA, has already been in beta-testing for several months. It’s now about to be switched on for all, with no choice to ‘opt out’ of the validation process as there has been during the beta testing phase.
As of October 27 last week, anyone using a pirated version of Office will no longer be able to download Office templates or other Office downloads. From January 2007, pirated Office users will no longer be able to check for and download Office updates.
Should a Service Pack 3 become available for Office 2003, or other security updates for Office 2003 and earlier, still supported versions, your copy of Office will be checked for authenticity before the download will begin.
If you’re not legal, you won’t be able to update Office, and will have to run the risk that documents you receive from others don’t contain threats that could damage your system.
Microsoft is implementing this program thanks to the widespread availability of the Internet and broadband. They can finally check whether your copy is genuine or not, with more and more software companies are following their lead.
What does Microsoft expect you to do? Why, buy Office legally, of course – whether the existing Office 2003, or preferably, from Microsoft’s point of view, the upcoming Office 2007, due to be released in the next few weeks.
Home users will likely be able to take advantage of a special ‘home’ version of Office that will allow you to legally install it on up to three computers, as is the case with the ‘Student and Teacher’ edition of Office 2003.
The cost of this special educational version is approximately AUD $150 and is available, without any particular checks for educational credentials (which are probably supposed to be carried out) from major retail stores in Australia.
The catch? It’s strictly for non-commercial uses only. Kids writing reports for school, or writing letters at home to friends, that kind of thing. And while you might be able to buy it and use it for business purposes in your Office, you won’t be doing it legally. The 2003 version also omits some of the main Office programs, only giving you Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint.
So, if you’re using a pirated version, there are only two choices available to you. The first is to buy Office. As Office 2007 will be released by the time the Office Update checks with OGA come online in January, Microsoft is no doubt hoping very much that the new Office 2007 interface along with all its other goodies will be more than enough to convince you to hand over the cash.
And while Office 2007 is an incredible, long overdue upgrade to the Office line, and is indeed the version of Office being used to write this article, the reality is that most consumers out there are familiar with the Office most known today. Starting from Office 95, then 97, 2000, XP and 2003, the interface has remained largely the same.
The drop down menus have simply gained an avalanche of new features with each new version, along with other tweaks and back-end stuff that many may never use at all. We know this because Microsoft was surprised to discover that the top 10 features requested for Office 2007 were features already available – people simply didn’t know how to find them.
That’s one of Microsoft’s rationales for introducing a brand new interface – for making all those features much easier to find and use – but as it comes at a cost, it might take a while before many people find out for themselves, by reading about it in the IT press, seeing it on a friend’s computer, seeing it in stores or buying a copy, installing it and using it for themselves.
This is where your second choice kicks in, especially as most people are familiar with the existing interface. As Office 2007 is so different, some people will prefer the existing interface as offered in the current-generation Office and all the Office clones.
These people will be more likely to learn the interface of one of the Office alternatives, whose number has been growing steadily, especially at the hard to resist price of free.
Office has always had a competitor in the Corel WordPerfect Office Suite. While it has had many names and owners over years, it isn’t free, but it’s much cheaper than Microsoft Office 2003.
Much more of a threat to Microsoft is the Open Office suite. The menus are different to Office, but the price is free, and for some, that’s enough to ease any transitional interface pain.
Other alternatives include Google’s new Docs and Spreadsheets, its packaged combination of its Calc spreadsheet and Writely word processor. It’s also free.
The Office alternative that most closely resembles Office 2003 right down to menu bars is ThinkFree’s Office.
While it is a free Office suite, you can pay for an offline version that you can run anytime, whether you’re connected to the Internet or not. However the free online version, which also gives you 1Gb of online storage space, works very well, and as long as you have an Internet connection, you’re good to go.
Other Office alternatives include 602PC Suite with a free trial, and EasyOffice, with a free version that’s for home use only (along with inexpensive paid versions for business use) although of all of these, Open Office and ThinkFree Office are probably the best ones to go for as free alternatives go.
What will you do for your next Office suite? Pay several hundred dollars to Microsoft for Office 2007, or see if you can live with one of the free (or inexpensive) alternatives? As Stan Beer explains in his ITWire article ‘Windows licensing no longer a question of trust’, the same now exists with the venerable Office suite. Microsoft is trying to get money out of all those people who’ve pirated Office over the years.
The question is, will those users pay? Or will they continue with a software package they can legally download for free? Only time will tell. It’s certainly much easier for ‘most people’ to load, learn and use an alternative to Office than it will be for ‘most people’ to learn Linux.
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