Microsoft continues to bury their head about the forced upgrades of Office being mandated after Redmond lost part of a patent trial.
MORE PATENT PROBLEMS
Microsoft continues to bury their head about the forced upgrades of Office being mandated after Redmond lost part of a patent trial.
Details in last week’s Office Watch.
Microsoft has said that a ‘small number’ of customers are affected but that clearly isn’t the case and they are saying different things to the media and their customers.
Office Watch readers have been sending us copies of what Microsoft or their licensing retailers are telling them – and there’s a big difference between that and the media statements.
In their short public statements, Microsoft says that only new installations of Office XP and 2003 were involved but in their direct communications to clients the company is saying something quite different. Microsoft is ‘requesting’ that ALL current Office 2003 or XP installations be patched for the sake of keeping all the software in an organization consistent. Many companies have such a policy but a ‘request’ from Microsoft is a different matter.
This difference between the public statements and the direct communications with clients means a major change in the workload for IT companies. Instead of just ensuring that new computers go out with the new version, now they have to decide whether to update all their versions of Office. That can be a major job especially since the patch stops some interaction between Excel and Access from working as it has until now.
And why make that ‘request’? Is that truly just a suggestion or will there be license consequences for organizations that don’t go along with this expensive extra? It’s easy for Microsoft to throw in such ‘requests’ when they don’t have to pay the costs of deployment.
It’s a tough call for organizations.
See Also
- Microsoft to stop selling Word & Office? – don’t think so
- Patent Troubles FAQ
- Patent troubles continue
- The ‘Patent’ change for Excel
