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Microsoft said goodbye to its little friend, Office Genuine Advantage (OGA), and quietly shut down the program last Thursday.
What that means for Office users is they're now able to download add-ins and templates without having to jump through any validation hoops to confirm that their copy is legit and not some black-market version or BitTorrent download.
"The Office Genuine Advantage ("OGA") program has been retired. For more information about the benefits of genuine Office, please visit the following website: Benefits of genuine Office," Microsoft wrote in Support Knowledge Base article 917999.
Anyone going to miss this? Anyone?
Comments are closed on this article
ShyLinuxGuy
December 21, 2010 at 3:50am
Microsoft should do the same for Windows...A few weeks ago I downloaded a trial version of Windows Server 2008 R2 from Microsoft's website to kind of "learn" about it, and needed to run the little "Genuine Check" program in order to proceed. I think Microsoft should dump WGA and use a hardware-based antipiracy solution, something like a SIM card in a cell phone that is inserted on the motherboard. It's a win-win situation: there is less of a worry of piracy, and for the user, there's no more of this annoying garbage. Uh-oh, I could've sold this idea to Microsoft but I just had to open my mouth! Darn it!
compro01
December 22, 2010 at 2:40pm
It's called a dongle. They've been in use for longer than Windows has existed and they're plenty annoying too.
livebriand
December 20, 2010 at 4:23pm
I wonder why they'd do that. Let's hope WGA gets retired too. I won't miss either.
***Heads to bittorrent***
COMMANDER_COOK
December 20, 2010 at 9:11pm
They are probably going to build on WGA to cover more of their products.
whitneymr
December 20, 2010 at 12:26pm
I won't miss it, my legit copy would some times get flagged as counterfeit.
orca11
December 20, 2010 at 9:59am
I won't miss it at all, especially now that I have the TSA to violate me for roughly the same price.
Eoraptor
December 20, 2010 at 10:28am
Amen to that
I'll miss this about as much as my migrane headaches
