4 ms·

Piracy of Microsoft products that allow offline use is rampant, especially in poorer countries. A cloud service is a really good tool to prevent piracy.

• judge2020 8y ago
  The only issue is that Office is extremely easy to pirate, and it's pirate-able by the (you guessed it!) offline authentication service, KMS. If it's so easy to pirate office then the cloud-based authentication service only serves to cause issues for those who legally purchased the software.
  • est31 8y ago
    I don't mean the downloadable thing, I mean the online thing that runs in the browser.
    • amaccuish 8y ago
      Sorry how could you pirate "the online thing that runs in the browser"? The problem is that recent OneNote versions (at least on Mac), require Microsoft signin and can't even open local note files.
      • est31 8y ago
        Well, you can't, that's my point. That's why it's so great for Microsoft: Nobody to pirate it any more, means more revenue.
        • arkades 8y ago
          Office365 still has a desktop executable, parallel to its online program. It's not all browser-only. I think that's why you two are talking past each other.
          • est31 8y ago
            Doesn't help that I've stopped using Office in favour of Open-/LibreOffice about 7 years ago or such :).
          • mrmondo 8y ago
            They're barely desktop apps - they're essentially bloated javascript heavy web-frame like apps that perform poorly, have many bugs (IMO 7~ years of use) and require login to Office365 / Azure online.
        • larkeith 8y ago
          (While this is almost certainly the case for Office, a well-known leader in its category, it should be noted that this logic is not accurate for all products - Increased opportunity cost to the legal consumer and lack of piracy externalities such as network effects mean "always-online" requirements may be detrimental.)
        • titanix2 8y ago
          OneNote for Mac is free.
      • Spooky23 8y ago
        It was just a SharePoint component. You can easily pirate it.
• rickycook 8y ago
  piracy is only an issue if it effects people paying for your product; if they were never going to pay anyway, why not give it away for free? keeping a digital product locked away out of spite is just... spiteful especially when it comes to poor economies! the cost of a windows/office license is a good portion of (if not an entire) yearly salary in some countries! removing the tools that help them to compete with more affluent economies is pretty poor form
  • snitch182 8y ago
    Why not use libreoffice?
  • est31 8y ago
    > the cost of a windows/office license is a good portion of (if not an entire) yearly salary In poorer economies you can just adjust the price to be comparable to local yearly salaries. It's not that piracy means that end users get the licenses for free any way: there are many people who sell pirated versions of Windows and Office. > removing the tools that help them to compete You can be just as competitive with Libreoffice and GNU/Linux as you can be with MS Office and MS Windows. The cime of piracy steals a giant market of hundreds of millions if not billions of people from Libreoffice and GNU/Linux and turns these people into second-class citizens.
    • z3t4 8y ago
      many software companies choose to upload "cracked" versions of their own software ...
  • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    > if they were never going to pay anyway, why not give it away for free? keeping a digital product locked away out of spite is just... spiteful How do you draw the line between "if you weren't going to pay anyways" and "well we don't have to pay, so we ain't gonna"?
    • LinuxBender 8y ago
• manigandham 8y ago
  They will have a full desktop version of the Office suite for a very long time so that makes no difference.