Discussion on:

Microsoft capitulates and some angst over Office 2013 is relieved

We have two laptops, and an old disposed of desktop that were at one time running Office 97 from the same install disk and the same product ID. All three were registered with MS. No problem.

Doesn't mean it's legal.

Bill

Seems to me that if it were not legal then MS would have not permitted it when it was registered. That in fact did happen when I was given the wrong product ID for an install of MS Project. It had already been used the maximum number of times for that license so we I attempted to register it MS refused to permit it. I had to ask my employer for the correct product ID.

Office 97 comes from the days before product activation. MS had no way back then of knowing how many pcs were running its software product off of 1 license. However, using the same software license multiple times is not legal. (They started using product activation with Office 2000).

MSO 2000 = no activation required and registration is optional

Office XP = MSO 2002 activation required and registration is optional
MSO 2003 activation required and registration is optional

never had a problem with moving MSO 2000 to a new system

same for the OS
win2K = COA only & no activation and registration is optional

win XP = COA + activation required and registration is optional

Microsoft didn't really keep track of licenses then.

Or if work has Open License with SA, then you can get a home use program which gives one install.

O365 Enterprise allows you to install it on 5 different devices used by you. It is licensed to you not a machine. For example my work uses O365 Plan E3 which is an Enterprise plan and is licensed to a user in the company. That user has it installed on their work desktop, their work laptop, their home desktop and their home laptop which leaves another copy for another device. Perfectly legal. When the user leaves the company they lose the license and it is assigned to someone else. 30 days after their license was terminated the copy they have on their home computers will not function. Simple.

If the VMs you are talking about are used by unlicensed users then yes they need to be licensed too but if the user has an O365 license assigned to them then the VM license could be considered another device, out of a total of 5 they are licensed to use.

Get on your iMac and purchase an application from the app store. You now have it on your iMac, your Macbook Air and, if its compatible, your iPad. No wonder MS continues to lose market share.

It will take time, but Miscrosoft will be the new Sybase.

You have two choices:
2 retail copies. Microsoft licenses [unless changed for 2013] states you can install a license on a laptop [or other device] and a desktop. As long as you don't use both at the same time, you are legal.
Alternative is buying a TechNet Plus subscription every year.

Unless you have a large investment in macros, or you use particularly complex docs that have to be xfered among many others outside your organization, why bother with Office when there are so many other excellent free solutions out there? Operation of office suites is similar enough that, despite the "experts", training is not a big deal.

If you're a mouse kid, maybe; if you're invested in using a keyboard, operation of office suites is NOT similar at all. In fact, operation between versions of Office is often not that similar--another problem. I hate Word in many ways, but I'm used to it and very productive. Using OpenOffice or another suite slows me down by an order of magnitude, because things *don't* work the same.

Differences are so great that casual users can't adapt to small differences in GUI?
This bugaboo is way overblown - basically just FUD.

If you are going to down-vote, at least try to think up at least one logical reason.
Are you saying you can't manage to use another GUI for casual office suite use?
In you cases, I'm not surprised.

If the shortcut keys are different, it's a major learning curve because many who us kb shortcuts don't even know where the options are in the GUI, they don't need to. Having to find them and learn a new set of up to 100 shortcuts is a big jump.

Problem is, not even MICROSOFT is fully compatible with microsoft. As you point out yourself, Phsiii, every time they force an "upgrade" on us, all the menus and shortcuts get shifted around for no apparent reason (other than to confound us), so if I am going to have to go through the whole learning curve all over again, it may as well be the learning curve to a new office suite this time.

what Mr. Jack Wallen has to say about this... I'm LMAO already.

After Uninstalling there are always traces of Office left behind in the registry. My licence checking software tells me all versions of Office that has ever been installed on every PC at work, even though all but the most recent has been uninstalled. BTW these are all legitimate licenses.
When will M$ clean up their so called uninstall!!!

That's pretty standard practice for most software. They leave traces (mostly your settings) behind so if you need to do an uninstall/reinstall to fix a problem you don't lose all of your customizations.

I have been a MS user from the very start. Over the years they have made some almighty cockups BUT in every case I can think of they have listened to feedback and backpedalled where necessary.

They will now keep my business

Well done MS!! Now we can start buying Office 2013...:)

I work in the Education industry and our MS licensing is very lenient apparently compared to what I am hearing here. I don't know why things would differ so much for other industries.

Really the only discussion here is about retail licensing. I don't think MS has changed their business licensing at all which is what you would be dealing with in the Education industry.

Bill

Why doesn't MS make it obvious that Office 2013 is a service that you subscribe to and that you don't have ownership of anything in their adverts?

This is a concept that has always eluded Microsoft. This is why as things stand now, company's like Google will do away with Microsoft and Apple, along with any other proprietary company's who attempt to force customer loyalty....

Google gets rich by selling your info. MS gets rich by selling you products. Which one is the bad guy?

Bill

They are pretty well exactly the same as Google's - not in exact wording, but as far as access/use of your data are concerned.
I'd like for once to hear/see an example of Google "selling your info", instead of the FUD.
And they are both equally bad, if you are willing to do a fair evaluation.

LibreOffice, OpenOffice... why all this noise about MS Office? Change! Be free!

If all I had to do was write a document and be done then I wouldn't have an issue with Libre/Open office. The fact of the matter is that I have applications that automate document creation which requires MS Office. I get Excel documents from other agencies that are basically applications written in VBA that I am required to use. I have hundreds of man hours invested in custom database queries saved in MS documents that would have to be recreated. I would guess that it would cost close to a hundred thousand dollars just to switch my small organization over to Libre/Open office (hire/contract 3rd party to build replacement apps, modifying 1200 documents, rebuild 30 custom database exports, training users, migration, conversion issues, lost productivity during initial deployment, ongoing support because this would be a deviation away from 3rd party vendor supported processes). Compared that to $15 thousand about ever 10 years (ROI of about 60 years). I don't upgrade office every time a new version comes out so that reduces our costs. We piggy back on a volume licensing agreement so that makes license management easy. It's just a lot more complicated than just individual document creation which I don't think most people realize.

Bill

I agree with both of you. For simple use / home use most other office programs are just fine. In fact, I suspect if Microsoft put a shortcut to Wordpad on the desktop by default and registered it for .doc files they would have sold far fewer copies of Office over the years.

But yes, in a business environment things are totally different. I always laugh when I see people say "just change, it's simple, free, and does everything Microsoft Office does". For a business that couldn't be further from the truth. You've done a good job of explaining most of the reasons (deployment through GPO and updating documentation are other big issues). Just because bold, italic and underline are in the same spots in the free alternatives doesn't mean they are as good as the same.

As you've mentioned you're only a small shop and you pay around $15k each time you upgrade Office. If it was as simple as many suggest it was to move away from MS Office to a free product then I think organisations would have done it by now.

I love to see all these people who act like open source is exactly the same as MS products. I like opensource, and I encourage open source use, but not for critical or complex tasks, particularly when an existing code base exists.
Lots of business do not upgrade with every new version, in fact I work with a fortune 100 that still has Office XP and Office 2003 running on over 50000 machines. For those who complain about compatiblity, even Office 2003 can be updated to open the new Office formats, but open office can't automatically integrate with existing business processes as you have clearly shared!

If you have a store of complex programs/macros, or you need to send complex documents to customers who insist on Office, then of course you should use Office.
As far as critical or complex tasks are concerned, I've found that open source programs are generally of higher quality - probably because the coders are actually interested in the product, and partly because of the high degree of control over the code and the project, which often puts software developed in cubicle farms to shame.

It doesn't ring true though. I remember reading an article a few years ago about how few developers there are actually working on the major open source projects. They did state how many contributers there were for Open Office - from memory I think there were only a handful of regular contributors. This explains the lack of advancement the software has had over the years.

The other problems with Open Source development are:
* Lack of cohesion. If you want to take a different direction than another developer you don't need to sit down together and work out the best idea - you just fork off the project
* 'Fun' code taking precedence over important code. When no-one's paying you, there's not much incentive to fix that illusive bug that you can't reproduce on your own hardware, or to update the documentation.
* Lack of time - developers generally have day jobs and do their Open Source coding when they get a chance

I don't think your jab about cubicle farms is on the money either. It's certainly not the case at Microsoft - all the developers have doors that close (among other perks).

Open source products superior to Microsoft!!! I call ********!! If they were, Microsoft would have to drop the price of their products to dirt cheap. That goes for Red hat, iOS and everything else. If you have the best mousetrap, people will buy it. But why change to 2013 when 2010 and even 2007 are perfect!! And are dirt cheap in comparison to 365 or 2013 cost's or licenses!!

- Windows is installed on almost every computer - try to get one without paying the "windows tax"
- Microsoft spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising. Open source spends zero.
- Part of MS advertising budget goes to shooting down open source. Nobody pays open source anything to shoot down MS (its all volunteers).
- Every windows machine ships with a trial of Office. None ship with a trial of open source.
- MS spends loads of money buying out or killing alternatives by any means at their disposal - less now than they did when they were convicted, we hope.

I'm glad to hear that MIcrosoft gives its programmers offices - they are one of the few mega-corps that do. Unfortunately, cubicle farms are still the norm in those businesses that are less well-heeled. I stand by my statement about the quality of open-source projects, and the greater enthusiasm exhibited by programmers doing something that they love, instead of doing what they need to do to earn a paycheck. There are also fewer pressures on open-source developers to take shortcuts, to meet deadlines, and to "brute-force" solutions instead of pursuing the more elegant alternatives. Look at the huge bloat of Windows over the years, with little commensurate increase in capabilities.
I've been in IT since the mid-seventies, and been a system-level and applications programmer for many of those years. I've seen both sides. And I see every year more open-source projects being adopted by business. That's not solely because they are cheaper - businesses don't trust their precious data to cheap alternatives.
Finally, I'll point to the plethora of security problems with Microsoft products. I know (from the inside) that all OS's are vulnerable to a degree - but nobody comes near Microsoft.
Rant over.

OK, this is a significant change, BUT, here's the fifty million $ question:
If you still have to go to the MS website to download the application, they still control what version you get (in other words when they come out with 2016 you WILL NOT be able to get 2013, because all you download initially is an installer that goes to a web site THEY control) and without the CD/DVD with the application on it, you're up the creek without a paddle, because everyone knows that whenever MS comes out with a new version, if you don't have a hard copy of the installation media, hang it up, you CAN NOT get it from them anymore!!!

Now let's see them address THAT before I even think of upgrading from 2007!

That's easy. You either buy the retail package, with DVD media included, or you simply backup your downloaded copy with your normal backup routine. Done! And when they (MS) come out with a newer version down the road, just buy the older version from another online store if you need another older copy of the software. I can still find copies of Office 97, 2000 & XP if I search hard enough.

My customers still find Office 2013 extremely annoying for a wide variety of other reasons:

• Eye Strain -- Numerous complaints about physical pain associated with prolonged use of the UI
  
• ADA issues -- Similar to eyestrain, I have received numerous complaints about unreadability of the UI for some visually challenged people.
  
• Slow -- Even on brand new computers, put head to head against Office 2010, the performance of the application on many normal operations is measurably slower. Over a typical day, it costs more to operate. Not good when there are cheap and free alternatives which are closing the gap on compatibility.
  
• Inefficient -- There are some cool new features in Office 2013, but for many typical functions which employees use day in and day out, Office 2013 requires more keystrokes, mouse movements or, screen touches (eeeewe). They add up quickly and make Office 2013 dramatically more expensive to operate.
  
• 3P Compatibility -- Numerous complaints about compatibility issues with Third Party Applications. Did nobody even receive a RC prior to publication? Or is this another Vista debacle where there was too much development between the final RC and RTM? (Oh, I forgot... Vista never happened... and these are not the droids we're looking for...)
  
• Change Management Issues -- Apparently MS never even heard of Change Management... I'll just leave it there.

Microsoft is bound and determined to force everyone to their new toy, but people are stil very, very frustrated. Long time partners (who are catching the heat from the customers) are complaining to each other as well as to Microsoft. For the moment, we have found legal ways to provide them with Office 2010, but eventually the only option (staying with MS) will be Open License. Microsoft, heed the warnings from Vista. Even small users need downgrade rights.

As a consulting design professional, I have explored and used the gamut, but always return to MS Office, despite the two steps forward and three back of ,curses under breath> Tool Ribbons. Alternatives, such as, OpenOffice, have serious limitations for serious professionals, particularly when it comes to deep compatibility. If you never do anything interesting in your presentations or don't need rich documents or sophisticated spreadsheets, fine. But do anything "interesting" in anything outside MS Office, and it will break for some of your audience. MS Office is the de facto standard in much of business and industry. If you want the widest compatibility with clients, you go with MS.

I started work with Linux lately and I'm pretty sure that with the latest distribution, that they are "user friendly" a lot of people are going to do so... there is a saying in Greece "The one that want a lot, loses also that what he has"... no further comment!

We used to be like ProfessorLarry, exploiting Office to the full.
Also used to licence on desktop, laptop, home PCs.
Suddenly realised we haven't had any reason to upgrade from 2007.
Some of our clients demand we share on Google docs, or other other collaboration platforms, quicker faster, get the content "good enough" with less polish on the formatting.
Proposals for work, that used to be big complex Word docs, are often typed directly into procurement web apps.
Google docs are pretty primitive, and frustrating to someone who has ruthlessly exploited the Office feature set, but you can learn to work within the constraints.
I wonder if most people will need Office. Sure, some will still need to produce high standard work in Word or PowerPoint, and build complex multi dimensional spreadsheets.
Documents just ain't what they used to be.