Does your copy of Office 2013 die with your computer? | Hacker News Reader

Does your copy of Office 2013 die with your computer?

theage.com.au

42 pointsmhw32 comments

What seems bizarre about this is that the licensed software market seems to be moving full-speed towards app stores with one-off fees, perpetual licenses and broad usage rights across a customer's devices. But with Office 2013 Microsoft seems to be stuck with a strategy from about 5 years ago.

Interesting data point that illustrates their confusion. On iOS the operating system can render Office documents for you with no additional software. On a clean install of Linux you can usually render and edit Office documents (using Libreoffice or OpenOffice). I imagine the situation is similar on Mac OS X and Android.

On a clean install of Windows 8 there is no software pre-installed that will render Office documents. Worse, if you click on a .doc file the operating system helpfully suggests that you can look for an app to open the file in the Store. The top match for opening .doc files in the Windows 8 app Store at the moment? Corel Office!

Microsoft does supply a full suite of viewer software

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/office-online-fi...

Your point is well taken, though, that the experience is generally inferior to other operating systems out of the box.

You made me briefly imagine an 'excel app' with a 10 hour download from an app store. Don't make me do that again. I'm still recovering.

.doc is a legacy format as far as modern Office is concerned (.docx is its native format). Not that this makes your example any less goofy, but it probably explains why Office 2013 isn't considered the top match for .doc files.

Microsoft make the lion's share of their money from businesses, not consumers. And the B2B software market--you know, the one Patrick Mackenzie says you should target if at all possible--is pretty much exactly aligned with Microsoft right now: per-seat SaaS subscription models.

Your point about "confusion" comes apart when you realize that there is almost nobody who wants to use Office, who then purchases a computer with Windows, but without Office. Computers bought from big-box stores already have Office on them. Computers bought in tech refreshes by Big Corporations have Office imaged onto them as part of the deployment. Office is a "separate product", but Windows isn't built to expect you to not have an office suite. The only reason it's optional at all is so you have the option to use a competitor.

Actually, I've hardly ever seen a new computer come with a full licensed copy of Office. A trial of Office, yes, but not a full-featured edition.

Office 2007/2010's 3-seat family editions, though, did get a ton more normal users buying Office than anyone could have predicted.

The only thing holding me back from going completely to Google Docs is the spreadsheet. For anything real, the Google Spreadsheet is simply not usable. It's a great proof of concept, and it works for small, unuseful spreadsheets, but for doing anything substantive, Excel is several orders of magnitude better.

I don't care if I need to install a separate, native executable/plugin in order to get better performance. If Google offers something that is usable, I would gladly switch to Google Docs.

I tend to agree - particularly on interactivity/performance - Is there something else that you're missing though?

That said, every time I use Google Spreadsheets I'm surprised at much it's rapidly improving.

Mainly speed, usability, etc. If you have a large spreadsheet with tens of thousands of rows, trying to scroll back and forth makes it unusable.

Curious: have you used Microsoft's web Excel in Skydrive? It has enough functions for my basic use, but then, so does Google Docs...

How do you define device? The CPU? The storage? The specific instance of the install?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

I imagine it will be like some forms of DRM. If you change even a hard disk, the entire copy is invalidated, as it's a 'different' computer.

I've had the unpleasent experience of within 1 week having my mother board replaced twice, and my wireless chip and keyboard replaced once. (And my bios service tag not properly reset after one of the motherboards). Through all of this, Windows somehow got the idea that I was pirating it (okay, pretty clear where it got this idea from). The license key that came with the CD did not work. After several boot cycles and re-tries at activating windows, I decided to try again, and when it failed that time I would use the activate by phone option. Somehow, when I ran the activation executable that time it activated without any further prompts. Not entirely sure what this story says about MS's computer fingerprinting.

Also, I left out of the story that: After the last hardware change windows booted several times without issue. After the first time it complained it was invalid the computer would fail to boot until I re-installed GRUB from a live cd. Between the GRUB incident and windows activating I identically let windows install updates (which I thought couldn't be done from an unactivated install). After these updates, when you try to log on, you get a fatal error in its attempt to launch 'your copy of windows might not be genuine' program, followed by a failure to launch explorer, followed by a black screen. I looked up the error, and it seems to be a result of the update unrelated to the activation issue. Booting into safemode and installing the update solved that. Several failed activation attempts later and my computer was good as new.)

One of the many reasons I use GNU/Linux as my primary OS.

Yet another case of DRM harming legitimate customers more than pirates. Meanwhile some guy in China is selling Windows DVDs with that stuff patched out and a full version of Office already installed.

There's absolutely no way I'd pay for an abusive experience like that, so I'll stick with GNU/Linux as well.

I remember this same type of question coming up before Windows XP came out. I wonder if it'd be something similar to this:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_xp-...

This is why I hate DRM. I want to be able to use my software forever.

If it's technically and culturally capable of doing so, the manufacturer has an economic incentive to want the software to die with your computer: That'll put you in the market for either another copy, or one of their newer products, every few years. Even if you were perfectly happy with the old version and upgraded your computer for other reasons.

This is stupid. There is a deactivate button on their website. It literally took me a minute to find it the first time I as looking for it. I've been able to deactivate and reactivate on more than two computers. The author should have done some research before spreading FUD.

http://i.imgur.com/Ei5wx1V.png

The problem is the fact that this whole "activations" thing is completely unnecessary and completely user-hostile (no bonus points for guessing whether pirates have to deal with this).

Even Apple, the poster child for the walled garden, locked down app stores we all love to hate doesn't limit how many devices you can have a given application installed on. They do limit the amount of devices that can protected music and videos can be played on, but even then they give you a once per year "deauthorize all" button (with exceptions granted with a quick call to support) and a de/reauthorize button in the app!

The article focused on the license terms, not what you can get away with. If you run a small business and don't want to worry about BSA license audits, this stuff matters.

It also appears that you're using a student version of Office, the licensing terms are most likely different for that version.

That image refers to Office 365 University, which is a subscription product. The article is not refering to Office 365 subscriptions, other than:

"Depending on your needs, you might find a single outright copy of Office Home & Student 2013 is more economical than an Office 365 subscription -- but not if you can't keep using it after you next upgrade your computer."

I will say that Office 2010 OEM licenses were a pretty good deal IMHO. Yes, you could only install them once... but they were close to half the price of a retail version. At least for me, it worked out to be cheaper to just bite the bullet and buy another license in the case of catastrophic hardware failure or major hardware upgrade.

Looks like the pricing is more confusing (and higher) for 2013 though.

What if you install Office on a VM? Can you run the VM from multiple machines? Can you move the VM from your old computer to your newer computer?

You 'Can'. The issue is Microsoft doesn't think you should (I believe you have to use a VL).

As for Windows VMs, I've found if you keep what is presented to Windows stable, it doesn't know the difference. Keep the MAC address on the network card static (this means you can't run two copies on the same network at the same time, which by the license you shouldn't anyway). After running on a number of different processors Windows may want to reauthorize though.

It would not be surprising if they put code that detected a VM in Win8 and Office 2013 some time in the future (or it's already hidden there)

>It would not be surprising if they put code that detected a VM in Win8 and Office 2013 some time in the future.

That would be really unfortunate. I run Windows 8 Pro in a VM with a valid license, mostly for the purpose of using Office 2013, which is also a valid license.

I realise that software like VMWare present their virtual devices as their own brand ('VMWare Network Adaptor' and alike), but isn't one of the points of virtualisation that the client doesn't know it's being run in a VM? At least I presume you could make the VM completely transparent, short of running timing tests on the virtual devices.

Yep, Windows can tell if it's running inside a VM. In Windows 8 you can see this in the Task Manager (Performance -> CPU). In the lower right it'll say something along the lines of:

Virtual processors: 2

Virtual machine: Yes

I love reading tech stories from sites that recommend I next read a story about "Killer Vaginas".

I suppose its a vaguely interesting technical point regarding terms and conditions, but in reality people will just go ahead and reinstall it anyway - with no penalty. I don't really see how this EULA change actually changes anything in practice.

Is that possible? I'm not the software will allow it. The OEM version phones home with your license key during install.

I've done it before with Office 2010, but I must admit I've not tried the latest 2013.

That said, I subscribed to the online MS Office suite (w/ SkyDrive and some other goodies) a few days ago and I'm impressed. The Microsoft user experience is pretty slick nowadays.

I've even switched from Google to Bing and Chrome to Internet Explorer for a month. At first the "newness" of it all was a bit jarring, like navagating an alien landscape, but after only a few days I don't think I'm ever going back.

Do yourself a solid and give it a test drive.

I tried this too and found the experience sucked. Microsoft just can't get its head out of the 90's. They still don't get the Internet. I think they never recovered after that.

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