Microsoft quietly shuts down Office Genuine Advantage program

robinbredin · 20 Dec 2010 at 17:54

Late last week, with absolutely no public announcement, Microsoft quietly retired one cog in its antipiracy machine.

An anonymous tipster informed me on Friday that Microsoft had shut down its Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) program as of Thursday, December 16. Previously, if you wanted to download an Office add-in or template, you had to pass through a validation step first, confirming that your copy of Office was “genuine.”

Find out more from this link,

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsoft-quietly-shuts-down-office-genuine-advantage-program/2798?tag=nl.e539

Duke · 20 Dec 2010 at 18:05

Odd, wonder why they removed it?

jake108 · 21 Dec 2010 at 11:29

Not surprised to be honest. It was more of a hindrance than anything else.

On one occasion it flagged some of my old works product keys as invalid (Professional 2007). They had valid licenses and could prove it too. Sadly Microsoft (UK-IM) had said to the boss at the time that we had obviously "leaked" the key ourselves as an organisation. Obviously our keys were secure, locked in a safe with very limited access.

Turned out someone might have used a keygen and "guessed" our valid product keys. We got audited a week later. Upset a lot of people. Microsoft policy is "blame the customer" and "we should suspect the customer is a pirate until otherwise proven".

If it was not pulled then that would more than likely have happened to another company and the same thing would happen.

apatia77 · 21 Dec 2010 at 12:58

Never really had any issues with it to be honest, but does this mean we won't have to buy their OS/software any more

I am sure there will be some other way to counter piracy.

feriso · 21 Dec 2010 at 15:59

Probably due to the cloud office editing they are going for in the long term