back to article Microsoft volume licensing site serves up customer details

Microsoft’s woes over at its revamped but pretty flaky Volume Licensing Service Center website continued today, after the firm inadvertently let slip the wrong subscription information to at least one of its customers. Many MS volume licence users have complained about Redmond’s lacklustre efforts to get its VLSC website fully …

COMMENTS

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  1. Duncan Wakeling
    FAIL

    My license

    if any of those found licenses are mine, perhaps he'd be so kind as to grant me access!

    I've been trying for the last 2 weeks to get M$ to let me add my latest agreements - currently saying I have 3 pending requests but nothing showing for me to authorise.

  2. PaulW
    FAIL

    @Duncan

    Here too... Im amazed anyone has actually managed to login to find out any of this information.

    And on the 2 occasions its actually worked the site has been sooo slow that by the time I've gotten to the page I wanted I've forgotten why I logged in and moved on to doing something else.

  3. Ammaross Danan
    FAIL

    Well

    Microsoft probably employs the same development strategy for their websites as they do for their OS. We're just fortunate enough not to get the website-equivalent of the BSoD: a 500 error. :)

    Of course, this is M$ afterall...they probably bought some company with a web portal for managing contracts and licenses and just strapped that on over their current eLicense database...thus they have no clue how the system actually works and they just put bandaids over bandaids. Wait, isn't that what they did with DOS?

    Yes, I'm being cynical in this posting, but hey, I actually have to use the licensing system so I have first-hand experience with it, which is more than some (most?) of the following flamers can say. (yes, I'm assuming someone's just going to say "M$ sucks tard use Linux")

  4. WireBug
    Gates Horns

    M$ Dropped the ball

    I too have been suffering since the change of the VL Site. I have been using the same liveID for a few years now and after they "updated" the service I was no longer the admin.... I am the only admin at my organization.... There were also 5+ year old email contacts that didn't even exist that appeared in the user administration. I called MS to get my admin status return all I got was a case number and have been ignored for weeks now.... to top it off, the old email addresses that were listed were from our VENDOR, not our company *sighs*

    *taps foot while STILL waiting for keys and a resolution*

    1. Usko Kyykka

      A fortune cookie for all occasions

      Life is a harsh mistress: she will eventually kill you.

      I know this doesn't exactly help with the problem at hand, but my experience is that once one accepts this it is at least easier to put things in perspective, and, thereby - ultimately - take it easy, have a peace of mind more often.

  5. Goat Jam
    Thumb Up

    All I can say is

    I'm glad to be a *nix admin so I don't have to play these stupid games.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    MS hasn't ever been good at ...

    making finished and usable products. Ever. (Some retrospective analysis follows)

    Windows 3.0 was (considering the time) actually quite good in that respect. Then we have 95, ME and Vista on the other end of the scale. Any company with smaller stash of cash would have gone to bankrupt with any of those. But monopoly can afford anything: They just rise the price of products. Just like MS has been doing .... But Apple is becoming very near, pricewise. That means competition and MS can't stand that, they lose. Currently market share, later whole company: If they sell cheaper, they lose profits and if they sell higher, they lose market share, which is same as profits for a monopoly. A monopoly need a lot of cash to keep that: Bought politicians, for first. Criminals always buys politicians first, it's the most profitable move you can do.

    This (VL site) is just the newest example of an idea (bought elsewhere) and shoddy implementation of idea. You can see same in Office 2007 or Windows 7: Some good ideas but nobody is interested at usability or overall quality: Those don't make money (and that's the second goal of MS, keeping monopoly is the first), because those people making the decisions have their secretary using the product, not themselves.

    It's always easy to buy cheap crap to _other people to use_. Nobody would buy less than adequate product for daily use unless there isn't an option to use something else. See what happens to Apple's market share and you'll see what I mean. If you can choose (money, policy,applications) from Vista or OS X, the choice is clear. 7 is just re-dressed Vista, all of the DRM is still in there. Anybody who understands what that means, won't touch it even with a 6 yards long stick.

    Especially when there's a ton of marketing eye candy , like in ... windows7. Or XP. Or Vista. Or Office 2007. Or actually anything made after NT3.51. "All chrome, no go" would a racer say about those. And he would be absolutely right: 90% of CPU-power and memory is used for pretty pictures, ie. nothing usable. (Pictures themselves are often good idea, that's not the point.)

    Also it's "normal" that nothing works like it should or works about a couple of days. Or that a PC machine lasts three years and then motherboard dies. Lowest common denominator (in quality) is nowadays the only available level. (Unless you buy Sun- or Apple -hardware.)

    MS hasn't been able to compete either whenever there's competition unless you can compete just with huge amount of money (meaning XBox). Their core bussiness is a monopoly and they are actively using monopoly-generated money for expansion and unfair competition, a practice prohibited by law but since DOJ was ordered to stop investigations (by Bush Sr.), judging those obviously has been left to EU.

    It's not doing good job either, monopoly is kept by keeping hardware manufactures in tight leash: "If you sell other than MS-products, we won't sell you ours (or the price is 10-fold)" and nobody have had guts to prohibit that, even when it's obviously illegal monopoly abuse in US and in EU. Money can buy you protection, even from the state prosecutor, obviously.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Security

    Their website obviously has the same security model as their operating system.

    ...no-one has written anything about the website chrashing yet tho!

  8. Steve Cooper

    @PaulW

    The trick is to use the site before 1PM - when our friends across the pond wake up the site dies an absolute death.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    And this is the company...

    ... that is trying to convince the commercial world that its products are fit for purpose for real-time, high-availability applications that are business-critical!

    What a joke.

    Oracle, SAP, et al must be laughing their socks off.

    I'm not going to rile the Microsoft code-monkeys that support this criminally-convicted, predatory US monopolist, against all the evidence that their products are shoddy, insecure, unreliable, and bug-ridden piles of crap, by mentioning the huge weight of evidence that Linux/Unix as a technology platform is infinitely superior in every respect for grown-up business requirements... oops, I just did.

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