Microsoft Bringing 'Genuine Advantage' Authentication to Office
|
Windows Genuine Advantage has worked so well that Microsoft is planning to introduce a version of the anti-piracy authentication program targeted at its Office suite. Microsoft officials said on April 24 that the company is commencing this week a pilot of "Office Genuine Advantage," (OGA) a program that will operate almost identically to Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA). Microsoft is piloting OGA in seven languages, initially: Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Greek, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Russian and Spanish. When asked about Microsoft's plans for extending the OGA pilot to North America and other regions, a Microsoft spokeswoman said: "While Microsoft Office is committed to participating in the advantages of Microsoft's overarching Genuine Software Initiative (GSI), there's nothing further to announce at this time." Microsoft already has in place an Office authentication mechanism, known as the Office Validation Assistant, or OVA. OVA uses an ActiveX control to scan users' systems to verify that they are running non-pirated copies of Office. Microsoft officials said the company plans eventually to replace OVA with OGA, but did not offer a timetable for doing so. Until this week, when asked whether Microsoft planned to extend its WGA program to Office and other non-Windows software, Microsoft officials said they were looking into such a possibility but had no definitive plans to do so.
Users validate by providing Microsoft-requested system information, including their Windows product keys, names of PC manufacturers, and operating system versions, which the Redmond software company uses to determine if customers are running legitimate copies of Windows. Microsoft officials have said that none of this information can be used to identify or contact individual users. Microsoft made the WGA program mandatory last summer. Microsoft also announced on April 24 that the company is adding a new piece to its WGA enforcement strategy. Microsoft is adding a new notification facility to WGA, so that Windows XP users who are running a "non-genuine" copy of Windows XP will have notifications sent directly to their desktop warning them they are running pirated software. Microsoft rolled out a pilot of the notifications component in Norway and Sweden in November 2005. In February 2006, Microsoft added five additional countries to the pilot. As of Monday, Microsoft added the U.S., United Kingdom, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand to the notifications pilot.
Microsoft officials did not offer a date for when it plans to move from the pilot to the mandatory phase for the WGA notifications faciilty. |
Comments (1)
I checked the MS Office Updates web page and found that at least one O2K download (the sounds.exe file) is included on the Office Genuine Advantage check, as another web site has hinted. Wow! That’s aggressive indeed! This does imply that O2K is headed for being Genuinely Disadvantaged for software cheaters.Hurray! But wait just a moment...I would say "Hurray, it's time we paying users got some kind of benefit," but OGA does not do that. What it will do is cut the number of smaller-time operations using Office down, and drive Office higher and higher into corporate-only use. It will make it actually harder over time for we legally licensed non-corporate users to easily exchange data with the non-corporate marketplace, as Office use dwindles.MS should be reminded that it has ended up having to give away its Visual Studio 2005 Express products in order to keep and/or seed the dwindling user base for its lockedyears-ago programming tools. How MS thinks OGA will help Office use in this context is quite a mystery.One point that should be considered is that when we legally licensed people first licensed programs such as Office 2000, they did not agree as part of any license procedure that future installation of the application would be dependent on such a check; this was certainly the case with early office 2000 releases devoid of activation.MS would argue that agreement to the OGA terms is only for the downloads, but if as the Bink site display suggests the install key is blocked after Ingenuine Office is detected, then an action never mentioned in the original Office 2000 license (at least in copies first sold sans activation being built in, and there were some in this category) is being retroactively imposed after the fact.One of the things that companies must now factor in for any software vendor is the vendor's "latent DRM escalation cost factor"--which we may define as the tendency to make even legal use more involved and time consuming. Genuine Advantage and Activation in general are marketed as easy and simple, but every time these go into action to validate, some extra time is used, not to mention bandwidth. Time is money. Time is employee salary.Perhaps it is time for academics, Opern Source advocates and planners within companies to study with care the actual "opportunity cost" of activation/validation intensive software vendors, especially to establish a latent DRM escalation factor for each vendor. It may turn out that after careful study there is a rising economic deficit implicit in the added time, bandwidth and hassle needed for activating and authenticating software. The latent DRM escalation factor will be an important factor to punch into the Total Cost of Ownership (which MS evidently has lots of data on) from here on in.Open Office in comparison has no such issues. By the way, I recently took a complex document that I typeset for a client on MS Word and found that we could transition that same document for continued use completely, and fully successfully, to Open Office.In my work I'm still at Office 2000, fully licensed, and have been making plans to transition to either Open Office or WordPerfect when or if an upgrade is needed. This ie because Office in later versions offers nothing new that I can use for the money it costs. I purchased WordPerfect 11 two years ago after a university client that a I wanted to do business with specified only WordPerfect and not MS Office as the document format that I had to use.I suspect that we non-corporates will find that we need to invest in other-than-MS "office" apps over time and that my experience presages the future.
Posted by Keith Risler | April 30, 2006 1:31 PM