I purchased a copy of Microsoft Office 2003 exactly one year ago. At that time it was available for download, and I didn't need the cd they sent me. There was no mention that they would be removing office 2003 and preventing anyone from downloading it in any way.
I had to do a clean install and reinstall it (because windows XP is so terrible it slows down my computer every single year), but when I went to microsoft.com to download it, it was no longer there. After speaking to a representative I was told there was in fact no way for me to download it even though I just paid $150 for a downloadable product last year.
They insisted the only option was to buy a new CD from them (even though they could easily provide a download). Given that a cd costs them next to nothing to make I thought maybe they would just charge $10 or so for shipping. Not only do they charge for shipping, they also charge $23 just for a program I already paid $150.
Microsoft could let me download it like with office 2007 now but this wouldn't allow them to screw over the consumer so that's obviously not what they're doing.
As some good news, I found a program from openoffice.org that is just like microsoft word (opens word files and saves files as word documents), only its completely free. I will never buy microsoft again.
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