Why pay all that money for MS Office, when you can get OpenOffice for free?

It's working for them.

Several of my friends have had to toss out their pirated software and look for legal alternatives, because they couldn't get important updates, tools, templates, etc.

Adamness, in our company most of the employees use 5% of what MS word is capable of.. they also use 5% of what their pentium 4's are capable of. But the type of business we do, and the need to have complex tables, calculations, etc, shared between different companies neccesitates using Office as opposed to, say, the very capable MS Works. WIth the pentiums, we need floating point. Same sorta deal.. lions locked in cages but you gotta have it.

Perhaps newer iterations of OpenOffice have resolved it, but after installing the then current version on a Fujitsu laptop with XPPro about a year ago, it would not run, just kept repeatedly crashing on launch of any of the apps. I may try it again, as we're running Office2K now and I'm not interested in making Bill any richer (me any poorer, actually). While O2K is more than adequate for our needs, MS is going to stop supporting or improving it soon and at least OO, if stable, will continue to get development.

Since my stuff is legit, I don't really mind WGA or even OGA, but once it's found to be genuine, for the sake of the gods, leave my machine and that tiny bit of network bandwidth and processing power alone. I don't run a VIN check on my car every time I start it just to make sure someone didn't swap it out on me while I wasn't looking.

MS is going to stop supporting or improving it soon

Office2000 is good on support till 7.14.2009

Since my stuff is legit, I don't really mind WGA or even OGA

I mind. I remember when the government wiretapping deal came out, people said they had nothing to hide, so they don't mind being listened in on. This isn't the point at all. WGA and government wiretapping basically means that Microsoft and the government assume we're guilty, and then invade our privacy to prove innocence (or not).

Microsoft has a right to prevent piracy, but I don't think they need to keep checking in on us as if we were little children.

And DesignCaddy, unless I'm mistaken (which I very well might be), OpenOffice can save files that are not only compatible with MS Office, but can save in the MS Office formats as well. Of course, for large companies it might suit them better to keep MS Office, but the average consumer could certainly switch to OpenOffice with no troubles. (Except a few hundred dollars in their wallets they'll have to figure out what to do with.)  

I've tried OpenOffice, and unfortunately it just doesn't measure up to MS Office yet.  There are many places where Write doesn't do as well as Word, where Calc isn't as feature-rich as Excel, and their presentation app is lightyears away from PowerPoint (and I *HATE* PowerPoint).  The project also suffers from the whole "We DON'T do things like MS Office" attitude, where they intentionally in places work opposite of how MS does things because they consider their way the better one.  And despite claims, saving and opening MS Office docs in OO is still flaky, and porting the docs into MS gets weird too

In order for OpenOffice to really take off, they need to match every major functionality feature of MS Office at the very least.  There needs to be as little of a learning curve as possible.  And to overtake MS, they need to have all the features PLUS something that just blows MS out of the water.

i don't believe that you can lump government eves dropping with software verification.. i took some time to read through the Microsoft Verification Privacy statements, with their certifications from different security groups, etc. It's verified not to identify you or collect unneccesary information. I also believe as a software maker who loses millions on people pirating their software ( and it's irrelevant how large their profits are, regardless ), a company has a right to protect it's property.

You also have a choice to enroll. If the software is important enough to you that you must have it, you must accept the terms of the maker. In wire tapping and so on, you have no choice.

Early on, the verification process was extremely annoying. To download a list of powertoys, for example, you would have to keep downloading verification files and punching in codes every time. It seems to be streamlined a bit, but i would still prefer that it verified you ONCE and then remembered who you are for future verifications of the same product.

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I tried using open office the other day on a test machine.. it took so long to load, i ended up just walking away from it and forgetting about it it also doesn't help you with secure forms and the office review process - a feature i love in Word.