Microsoft sucks, on so many levels. In their latest anti-piracy scheme, they've managed to screw over all of their largest customers.
Corporations using the Select version of Office, which includes a site distribution license to eliminate the need for individually registering each installed copy of Office, have recently been hit by a bug that's prompting users to register Office with Microsoft. Of course, this is precisely what the Select version is supposed to get rid of.
But wait, it gets better.
When prompted to register, you can select "Remind me later." Well guess what? You can only select this 50 times, and then Office will refuse to load.
But wait, it gets even better!
Becuase of another known bug, the registration wizard will refuse to start after the 50th try! So, now users are unable to use Office at all, nor can they register it to enable it again.
So why am I posting this on my site?
Guess who discovered the problem affected a certain "Select" corporate customer that signs his paycheck.
Bastards.
Full story on The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/30301.html
Re: Corporations Suffer Microsoft Activation Bug
ROFL... you mean your place got affected too?? Oh well... maybe they need to read the guy on slashdot who posted about openoffice
here it is:
Makes me glad (Score:5, Interesting)
by nigel.selke (665251) on Thursday April 17, @11:39AM (#5751730)
(http://www.rogue.co.za/)
That our company has switched over to OpenOffice exclusively. It's been a year since we switched over from Microsoft Office, and there have only had a handful of documents that have had MS Office/Open Office incompatibilities.
Plus, OpenOffice is totally free. Retraining was a non-issue. We told the employees when we switched over that they were welcome to use MS Office, but they would have to buy the software themselves and keep the licenses handy. There were no complaints about switching over after that.
So we can sit back smugly as all of our branches are unaffected and read stories like this without blanching :) If you haven't checked out OpenOffice [openoffice.org], I highly recommend that you do.
Re: Corporations Suffer Microsoft Activation Bug
yeah, we got hit. So far it's a rather odd problem, though. The registration prompt is popping up on all freshly imaged PCs (which is how I discovered it), and on PCs where Office hadn't yet been run since installation (including a year+ old install back in the lab). Most users, of course, have already been using Office, so they haven't been affected. Don't know why, though, nor do we know if this is only temporary.
I did see the post about OpenOffice, though. Not that it does any good here. I've really just given up on all hope of getting any OSS/Free Software in here. Despite the fact that the budget is so tight right now that we can't purchase any new harware or software, and are currently in the middle of a "work reduction" program.
Sigh.