The level of incompetence at Microsoft is unbelievable. Create a product, to run on YOUR OWN other product, but does not work without some sort of user screwery for an absurdly large amount of your user base... awesome. Its not like I am installing this
off a disc that was produced a year ago, this was a digital download direct from them this morning!
On the bright side, its a very happy error message, like a breath of fresh air; I imagine a pixie jumping thru a field of flowers while cheerily saying "We're sorry, we are having a picnic lunch right now and can't process your activation! Please try later!"....ARRGGGGG!!!!
How useless? What about giving you SOME indication that might lead you in the correct direction to find a fix.
Anyways, sorry for the rant. I have 3 brand new Latitude machines from Dell for a customer, Office downloaded and installed just today. All 3 of them would not activate. 'Run as admin' fixed the issue on 2, but not the third. For those of you who may still
be stuck, you can try this - thanks to http://grok.lsu.edu for this tip:
Open command prompt as admin. cd to Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15. type
cscript ospp.vbs /act
...then do a little dance, cross your fingers, and pray it works. This is why I have run Linux or OSX on all my machines for nearly 10 years.