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Microsoft silently kills off Office Genuine Advantage anti-piracy software
Microsoft has silently decommissioned one of its primary weapons against Office suite piracy, the Office Genuine Advantage scheme. A wolf in sheep's clothing, OGA was essentially a road block through which you had to pass to download templates and the like. Proving that your Office installation was genuine allowed you through, and while it's obvious why it was there, it created yet another hurdle for legitimate users to jump over, while the pirates just circumvented it.Microsoft seems to be keeping this one strangely quiet, even from the rest of the company, as the only mention of the demise of OGA being a retired Knowledge Base article, which ZDNet managed to dig up. Links for validating your genuine Office software across the rest of Microsoft's sites seem to be broken, indicating that the news wasn't internally circulated. Still, one less hurdle for legitimate users is always a nice -- goodbye OGA, you won't be missed.
Comments
8
Subscribe to commentseesel12387Dec 20th 2010 6:16AM
The online activation required by Office 2010 is the reason I'm not updating from 2007. What happens if my hard drive failes and I need to reinstall Office on a new computer or after a clean reinstall of Windows? You need to do the activation again and you will be rejected because you have already used your activation. So you will just be left empty-handed although you have payed for the product and should have the right to reinstall it every day if you like.
I would rather use OpenOffice than 2010 because i'm not paying for something that can only be used once.
Anthony S.Dec 20th 2010 6:41AM
@eesel12387 I've already run into this problem... or rather, non-issue. I was able to reinstall Office 2010 without issue after wiping my computer. You're activation will not be rejected. I've actually had the same experience with Windows 7 as well.
eesel12387Dec 21st 2010 10:23AM
@eesel12387 I know you can actually install it more than once but there is a limit for how many times you can do this. I for example run into this problem on a school computer where half of the computers in the classroom were unable to use Office because it failed to activate, since the number of allowed activations was reached.
Antonio Carlos PortoDec 21st 2010 1:26AM
@Anthony S. Same here, Office 2010 installed without problems on two distincts machines
Gardiner WestboundDec 20th 2010 7:20AM
Stopped upgrading after Office XP. Switched to OpenOffice several years ago and haven't looked back. OOo does everything I need without the aggravation MS visits on customers.
JonnyDec 20th 2010 10:20AM
Activation doesn't work, period! I remember when they first introduced it years ago - hackers broke it in mere days while legitimate customers are still annoyed by it today. Big companies have to live with a small fraction of piracy, there is no other way to be fair to the people who actually buy your products.
DonDec 21st 2010 4:45PM
I was wondering why it disappeared from my 'hidden updates' page in Windows Update. Go screw, Microsoft! Did you honestly think I'd willingly install this?
DuckJan 29th 2011 3:31AM
I hated everything about Genuine Advantage.
I wish Windows Genuine Advantage was out, too. I have both Windows Vista and Office legitimately (hah, who would pirate Vista, anyway?) and I've had issues with them not showing up as "genuine", which is annoying, since I paid enough money at Best Buy that you'd think they'd be less buggy -- or at least more helpful when the computer decides that I am actually a pirate, out to steal its preciousness.
The irony here is that my friends who have pirated copies of the above (okay, not of Vista, but of different editions of Windows. Because again -- who'd pirate Vista?) and pirated office? Never had the problems I did.
It wasn't a significant deterrent to people cracking the software, but it was a significant pain to deal with if you were faced with issues despite the legitimacy. (The official Windows online advice essentially amounted to "buy it again, better luck next time.")