The only people who could run it would be valid Office 97/2000 license holders.
(edit: confirmed Office 2000 does include)
What did they do with the software? Good question. It might have just be soemthing they decided not to support/develop any longer.
Or it could have been part of their anti-trust ruling to stop developing it. As that would be another area monopolized. I never used the app myself, so I am unaware of the status. But Ms has an odd way off removing apps, making them disappear, then in a few years bringing them back to life as "innovation", such as the paper-clip & dog in MS Office, which first started out in MS Bob.
Alot of apps do not do gif compresion, due to the past copyright issues with the developers, Compuserve. Since the compression is patented by Unisys, they charge a license for any program which carrys the gif compression. So alot of programs will opt not to carry it.
an alternative to gif is png and mng.
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License Information on GIF and Other LZW-based TechnologiesThe fact that a product includes a notice regarding the need for a Unisys license (or a statement that the software is "freeware") should NOT be relied on to avoid liability, since the distributor may not in fact be authorized to distribute the LZW software and may itself also be subject to liability along with the recipient.
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PNG
So what is PNG, and why is it worthy of its own home site? PNG (pronounced ``ping'') is the Portable Network Graphics format, a format for storing bitmapped (raster) images on computers. Unofficially its acronym stands for ``PNG's Not GIF.'' PNG was designed to be the successor to the once-popular GIF format, which became decidedly less popular right around New Year's Day 1995 when Unisys and CompuServe suddenly announced that programs implementing GIF would require royalties, because of Unisys' patent on the LZW compression method used in GIF. Since GIF had been showing its age in a number of ways even prior to that, the announcement only catalyzed the development of a new and much-improved replacement format..
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A Basic Introduction to PNG Features
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Multiple-image Network Graphics (MNG)
A PNG-like Image Format Supporting Multiple Images, Animation and Transparent JPEG. Some Features; way better compression than GIF animations, support for difference (or ``delta'') images for still better compression. integration of both PNG and JPEG-based (``JNG'') images