If you want to install Office 2010 on a computer, you can’t buy it new from Microsoft. They will sell you Office 2016 or a subscription to Office 365. The older product is no longer available from MS or other official resellers like Amazon.
But if you go online, you can find people who will sell you (for as little as $9, in some cases) a link to a download of the software and a product key that will allow you to install it properly. (To be clear, this is not someone reselling an official CD or DVD package that might have been previously installed and then uninstalled.) The instructions typically say you should install it shortly after you get it, and not wait weeks or months, implying that the key will not work after a certain period.
What’s going on here? Are these people somehow obtaining or generating initially valid (i.e., working) but unauthorized product keys? How? And does MS somehow catch up and invalidate the keys so they won’t work if you wait too long to use them? How would MS do that?
Is the sale of software in this way illegal? Is purchasing it illegal? Are sellers or buyers ever prosecuted, like music pirates have occasionally been?
I don’t know this particular case. It could be legitimate, they could be selling legitimate keys that have an expiration date not too far off. For other products it could be a temporary key such as for a 30 day trial period but I don’t recall Microsoft offering anything like that. Or it could be a scam.
If it is legit it would be valuable at a low price for even a limited time period to people who have old data they want to continue using short term before upgrading in some way. Otherwise, if you just won’t give up and get the new software it’s kind of crazy to keep trying to revive the dead this way. In other areas of software I have done this plenty of times, repeatedly for the same clients, each time hearing how it’s the last time and they’re finally going to switch to that new software by the end of the year. And then finally one day it won’t work anymore.
Microsoft offers 90-day free trial copies of Windows 10. This was the Enterprise edition; it was intended for businesses looking into switching their computers to Windows 10.
I suppose people could be obtaining such evaluation copies and selling them online.
With some further Googling, I may have found an explanation.
So these people I saw may be selling some of these 70,000 stolen product keys.
I assumed that this kind of thing was happening with all sorts of old software, and that Office was just the product I happened to notice. But maybe it’s only Office, and it all stems from this particular incident.
But why didn’t MS just invalidate all the stolen codes? Did they not have an inventory of the ones they turned over to GER? Seems a little careless.
Someone who wants an outdated version of Office must be a casual user. If that’s the case, they could save their money entirely and use for free OpenOffice from openoffice.org which is an Open Source free replacement for Microsoft Office. It works on the Mac, Windows and Linux. We use OpenOffice on all the workstations and don’t miss Microsoft Office at all.
LibreOffice or LibreOffice Portable is the successor to OpenOffice. It’s an excellent free full office suite, and a good alternative to MS Office.
Online there’s Google Docs, which is free and provides all the functions you will ever need.
Both LibreOffice and Google Docs will read and write MS Office file formats.
If you absolutely have to have Office 10, there are pirate versions easily available on BitTorrent - BUT watch out for viruses, and you you may need some technical expertise to understand what you’re doing.
Sure, if they identify the breach and know which codes are involved, they can stop it (assuming the software uses online activation). But this is not remotely the only time the keys have been leaked. And they didn’t find the leak until 2015: meaning those keys were probably already used up by that time.
No, keys are just regularly leaked or acquired in various ways. People will even figure out the method to make the key themselves–meaning you need to hurry and use it before the legitimate buyer does it.
Not true. I’d consider myself a power user: I use Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, and Publisher virtually every day to run my small business. I want to use Office 2010 because I have been using it and its predecessors for decades, I like the integration of all the apps, and I don’t want to have to learn a whole new interface. The goddamn “ribbon” of 2007 was a stupid and unnecessary change, but I’m just about used to it now.
I don’t want to “upgrade” to Office 2016 or 365, because I don’t need anything in 2016 and I don’t want to pay a monthly fee for software I’ve paid for many times over already.
If I only used Word or Excel, I might switch to an open suite, but my business is centered on an Access database that I have been using and customizing for more than 20 years. Publisher is also essential to my business. I’m sure there are new, and in many ways better, database and desktop publishing apps, and if I were starting out now I’d probably use them. But I’m a one-person business and the tools I’ve been using for 21 years work fine, I see no need to change them, and I won’t unless absolutely forced to.
Legally, these resellers are in the clear if they are *just *selling used software. Microsoft does not have the right to prevent them from reselling software that they sold. That is assuming the seller deletes their copy of the software when they sell it to you, and only sells it to one person.
That disclaimer implies that many of these resellers are actually waiting a 6 month timeout, where Microsoft’s servers will “reset” and allow you to activate the same software on a different computer with the same license key, and then selling the software again to someone else. That is illegal, but obviously not trivial to prosecute, especially if the reseller is not in the United States.
One thing that is super annoying is that software projects written in previous versions of visual studio only load up without errors on the exact same version of visual studio used to create it. There is an “import tool” but it throws a screenful of errors every time you try to migrate a complex project, which can be near impossible to fix if you were not the original author of that project.
So you have to have the old version of Visual studio, which microsoft will not sell unless you have a special relationship with them. Similarly, sometimes you must have an old version of windows to get some old tool to work. Same story.
So I’ve more than once found myself just resorting to piracy, as I didn’t have time to do anything else. Once I found the correct version of windows and visual studio (I pirated it first to make sure it even works) I would go dig up a used copy off ebay of the software in question.
I have recently heard of people reselling licences out of their volume agreement with Microsoft - typically these are offered at ‘too good to be true’ prices online.
Microsoft doesn’t condone this, but i think it’s one of those things that works long enough for people to buy it, activate, and post a ‘hey, this really worked’ type review. Later on (i.e. when MS notices that activations within a single volume agreement are happening all over the place), I expect the buyer will find themselves abruptly not-licensed-anymore.
I’ve not seen that for office 2010 though - so maybe cheap licences on the market there are from companies selling them off when they shifted their own people to O365.
Or someone managing a standard software suite that has not yet been updated to the latest and greatest. Microsoft recognizes this; most volume license agreements include downgrade rights so that an IT shop can maintain their fleet until such time as they are ready to make the switch - which can be a non-trivial exercise.
Also, there are differences in features of each Office product between each generation. Some features regress or disappear completely.
I had a tablet and I had an older version of OneNote on it and it was sweet, I upgraded and a lot of the drawing features for shapes and what not disappeared. I believe they did this so that OneNote more or less conformed across all platforms (mobile, tablet, PC) as at that time when I upgraded I had a Windows phone and the UI/UX was almost virtually the same. Previously, OneNot was a PC type thing.
As for selling, yes, there are companies that have a volume license agreement and sell. I’ve bought a couple of copies of Win10 this way for $20.
You sound like you are comfortable with the potential risks of this choice - I’m not going to try to persuade you otherwise, but I would just suggest: make sure you have a viable plan for what happens next time one of your computers goes bang.
It’s typically possible to continue running software well past its End-Of-life for support, including the EOL for activation; I’ve seen quite a few cases where purposely hanging back and not upgrading was cheap and expedient right up to the point where it wasn’t - and then it was a disaster, because the gulf between the old version and the new one was too big to easily jump.
If you’re sure you’ll still be able to install 2010 on the next computer you buy, go for it. At some point, though, online activation of Office 2010 will no longer be supported by Microsoft.
Open office packages (Open Office, Libra Office, free word processor like AbiWord, etc) all work fairly well. However, I’ve had issues opening some documents created by Microsoft Office on many of these free software platforms. Generally, most things work, but occasionally something will go all wonky, often something related to formatting.
If your business standardizes on one of these open platforms then you’ll probably be ok and you’ll save a bunch of money in licensing fees. But if you have to interface to users who use Microsoft, you can run into compatibility issues between versions.
The OP mentions being a one-person business, so ripping off the bandage now may be easier than trying to install Office 2010 in 2030. My bit of advice is that I have had good luck avoiding compatibility issues by sending people electronic documents as PDFs. I do run them through the “pre-flight” tool in Adobe Acrobat to make sure they are compatible PDF/A or PDF/X files with no funny business, and then it doesn’t matter what version of what software was used to create them.
I switched to Libre Office about six months ago (when I dumped Windows in favor of Linux). The only major issue I’ve found is that math objects created in Word don’t translate well, if at all. And as a math teacher, I have lots and lots of Word documents with math.
It doesn’t really bother me much, though, because more and more I’ve been writing my math documents in HTML using MathJax. Word was only a fallback for the last couple of years, anyway.
MathJax works well for creating web pages. If you need to create traditional documents, typically (today and for a few decades now) what everybody does is just use LaTeX.
That goes for technical/mathematical documents. For business use like memos the experience will be completely unlike Office 2010, though if you know what you are doing you can prepare, once and for all, a LaTeX style file that sets up your document’s fonts, layout, etc., and all you need to do each time is write the text.
The real point is that if you are one person, it absolutely doesn’t matter what you use (I’ve used WordStar, WordPerfect, Indesign, and so on for various purposes), but if an entire department needs to standardize then any changes become a major issue.
You’ll never guess why I was looking to buy a “new” copy of Office 2010. Actually, nothing went bang, I just wanted to move to Windows 10, and finally overcame a major obstacle that had delayed me for a couple of years.
I’m 62 now, and if I’m still running this business in 2025, much less 2030, I’ll kill myself. With any luck, the key components of Office I rely on (Access and Publisher) only have to last a few more years.
I wasn’t aware of this option until it was raised in this thread. However, according to this document, it seems as though downgrade rights only apply to bulk commercial licenses, not the retail packages an individual like me would buy. Do I have any downgrade options other than, as suggested above, buying a second-hand package from someone with a commercial license? That sounds a) potentially hard to find and 2) possibly somewhat legally iffy.
I’d forgotten there was a 2013 edition of Office. Legit used or new copies of that might be more easily available. I’m looking into the differences between 2010 and 2013.
Actually, nothing went bang, I just wanted to move to Windows 10, and finally overcame a major obstacle that had delayed me for a couple of years.