Part of our plan of moving to London is to simplify our computing resources. There is no way that we can take the huge beige boxes, monitor, cables, accessories, etc. The plan was to replace my Windows desktop machine with a MacBook Pro and my Linux Server with a Mac mini. At the last minute, we also decided to upgrade K’s iBook to a new MacBook so she would be well prepared for school and it would be covered under AppleCare while we are abroad. This is where Microsoft comes to haunt.
In preparing K’s new MacBook for her, I installed Microsoft Office v. X. But upon running it, I received a message saying that it was already running somewhere else and I was violating the license agreement by trying to run it again. Huh? In reality, the software actually came with three product keys and licenses to run it on three machines. This was only the second installation.
If this were a technology blog, I would go on in detail about all of the problems I found with the installation and design of this software and the User Experience short-comings. I’ll just say the short of it is that it uses incorrect permissions on the installation; it can’t be uninstalled in typical Mac fasion by dragging it to the Trash; it can’t tell which of the three product keys was used with each installation; it won’t let you copy and paste the product id generated from the product key and it somehow thought that it was installed twice on this machine (presumably from transferring user profiles from the iBook to the MacBook — even though the Applications weren’t transferred over).
I believe that I have it all sorted out now, but this is an example of how software that trys to enforce license agreements ends up hurting the paying customers. While it may seem that if you aren’t doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about, somehow it never turns out that way.