Microsoft 'sorry' for volume licensing website cockup

Microsoft has apologised to its partners and customers who have struggled with the firm's volume licensing website, after the company overhauled its service. As we reported last month, Microsoft's volume licensing websites were yanked offline for over a week while the software giant tweaked its service in a move to "improve …

[Anonymous Coward]

"In standard systems testing"

And yet it's in production, released to the public, and the portion thereof with fat wallets at that. Well, we've known for a long time that any Microsoft initial release was really an early beta, but it's rarely been confirmed by a Microsoft mouthpiece.

[GlynO]

bring back eOpen

never thought I'd every write that

eOpen was shockingly bad and random - days you needed it you could 99% bank on it being down, if you hit the main pages you knew the MSDN stuff wouldn't load properly

when they said they were merging eOpen and VLSC i feared the worse - not surprisingly the site wasnt in very good shape at launch, but a few days later it was up and working for me. Since it was taken off-line I've been unable to login, emails sent back saying yes it was broken but we have fixed it - erm no you haven't

as for ringing, I have better ways of wasting hours of time

MS need to understand that they MUST make licensing as simple, quick and pain free as possible. Also as stated in the article, worrying that one of their most important sites has been a disaster for the last 4-5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Good site, but will not work the one time you need it

I have used the site many many times in the past, and I cannot remember a single time when I logged on and found what I wanted first time, or without any delay or problem; the mysterious thing is that normally the rest of the site works fine.

For example, early this week I wanted to download Office for Mac. Every other language was there apart from English, regardless which version of Office for Mac I was downloading. I reported it and English was there the next day, however it's exactly as I say - while the rest of the site may be fine, the ONE thing you NEED won't actually work.

[Enderboi]

Missing language downloads

I was told to expect a 72 hour turnaround for the same issue with Office 2007 Standard.

Still waiting, and its been closer to 92 hours :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's crap

I have been trying to download the Win 7 64-bit ISO for three days - the pisspoor (ASP) download manager just won't start for me in IE8 regardless of how I tweak the browser's security settings, and the (java) firefox version keeps stalling AND THEN when you close and restart it, the download begins again from 0%. Twice I have got into the 2GB area only to have to start again. What part of 'download manager' does Microsoft not understand.

I'm sorely tempted to grab the ISO via bittorrent.

[Cantankerous Old Buzzard]

Micro$lop is sorry

I agree.

[WinHatter]

Easy to say sorry ...

when you don't really mean it.

[David 5]

Microsoft web technology

MS .net and .asp are crap.

php, HTML, and Javascript does a much better job.

Microsoft should use open standards and better platforms than their own.

It costs them in downtime and reputation when they use .net, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

I Dun a Booboo, ho ho ho!

Doh, I'm sorry but it's not like it's mission critical or something is it...? You're using Win 7 for mission critical stuff, but why? We don't. We use Linux cos it's more secure & we don't pay for it either.

Look we just made Win7 as an alternative to Vista which also doesn't work. Why would you think it would? Win 98 fell over heaps, then we did WinME as a joke & the joke was on yous, then XP was allright after we patched it a few times but Vista was just for a laugh. You can't blame us for that. I thought it looked really cool with all those boxes jumping up so you couldn't do nothing.