Microsoft has announced that it is to launch its upcoming office suitw, Microsoft Office 2010, with its own ‘Genuine Advantage’ package to ensure that the suite doesn’t see the same piracy as its predecessors.

It’s long been one of the stranger features of the Office landscape that there is a freely available and entirely usable alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite (in the form of OpenOffice.org) which hasn’t seen uptake as widespread as piracy of Microsoft’s Office. However, that could be set to change with the introduction of a Genuine Advantage feature to Office 2010. That said some of the statements in Microsoft’s press release about Office 2010 are actually quite funny, certainly we laughed aloud at some of the text, which includes,

“…it’s tempting to run a quick search online and find a sealed copy of the standard Microsoft Office 2007 suite, which usually sells for $400 package, for $200. A couple more clicks and it’s in the mail.

Too good to be true? Most likely, yes. In fact, it’s so good, it’s probably either counterfeit or pirated.”

In response to what’s fairly clearly a widespread piracy problem with Office 2007, Microsoft has announced that it’s ‘expanding its Office Genuine Advantage’ setup to another thirteen countries.

What this means is that anyone running Office 2010 in any of the 41 where OGA is in place will be required to authenticate their copy of Office over the internet. The only problem with this move is that, as with pretty much any anti-piracy move, the overall impression we’re given by this is that Microsoft is going to be making things a little more awkward for those of us who do shell out for Office 2010.

Anti-piracy measures that require their own removal for software to be pirated only mean that pirates won’t have to deal with them, which means the only people who end up being bothered by them are legitimate customers… who I’d have imagined Microsoft wouldn’t like to bother, given that OpenOffice is quickly growing to resemble Office 2007…