From: "Rich Gauszka" 

Being constantly inundated by Office WGA checks or just switching? Looks
like people have got the message and will switch.

http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/4054/53/

 Microsoft Office users ready to jump ship: poll
Microsoft may want to rethink its intention to inundate users of pirated
versions of Office with unwanted alerts. A recent poll shows most users are
likely to defect to the free open source equivalent, Open Office.org,
rather than pay for Office 2003.



An iTWire poll taken in the past day asked the question: "Would you
try Open Office.org instead of buying MS Office 2003?"  Of the 441
respondents which voted in the space of 18 hours, 381 (86.4%) voted yes
while just 60 (13.6%) voted no.

Microsoft believes it will be able to convince pirate Office users to pay
to upgrade to legitimate versions through its proposed Office Genuine
Advantage (OGA) program. OGA, modelled on the Windows Genuine Advantage
(WGA) program, which Microsoft claims has been a success over past months,
identifies users of pirate copies of Microsoft software when they download
the necessary critical security updates. Once identified, Microsoft sends
continual alerts nagging users to chuck their illicit software and pay for
the real thing.

While WGA may have been a success, however, there is one big difference
between sending users verbal barrages to pay for Windows and sending
similar alerts to Microsoft Office users.  The difference is that Microsoft
Office 2003 users can easily download Open Office.org 2.0 and be up and
running with a similar product, with a similar look and feel and all their
data and functionality intact, for absolutely free. So most would prefer to
give that a try rather than shell out hundreds of dollars for MS Office.

With Windows, however, the story is radically different. To date, there has
been no viable alternative to Windows XP that would enable users to switch
painlessly to an equivalent operating environment - the efforts of Novell,
Red Hat and others notwithstanding. Thus, the only choice is to receive
continual alerts or pay up for a genuine copy of Windows.

This of course presents a huge problem for Microsoft because about one
third of its revenue comes from MS Office sales.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5