As an aside, MS product support can be holy-shit-I-didn’t-expect-that-to-go-so-well good. (Note that I find their marketing-driven changes to Office and Windows reprehensible and I hope the set of executives responsible for those decisions to get a shitnugget caught on their uvula.) Anyone else out there have to call the activation service and talk to a person? It’s happened a couple times to me and most recently (1 month) to my brother–every time has been astoundingly easy. Plus, they just replaced an out of warranty keyboard because I asked nicely. Yowza.
So aside from MS/Apple bashing (both of which deserve heaps), do take a moment to call the server and try and get through to a human. Perhaps you’ll be surprised.
I’ve tried 3 times today.
I’ve gotten disconnected all three times, after tediously keying in my 30-digit code on the phone, while the annoyingly chipper robot tells me to enter the next group of digits.
I don’t have any real love for Microstiffie and there is no doubt that their products have caused me endless hours of suffering. Of course a large part of that is the fact that I DO tend to download a lot of software and some of it tends to not be well written and/or well behaved. And we’ll completely overlook any of the little buggers that happen to evade my virus scans.
In the world of Apple’s “walled garden” I believe it’s called, I don’t think those things are likely and perhaps not even possible. I don’t use Apple products and wouldn’t touch one even if you paid me. Is that because I’m a masochist? Well, yes actually, not that it’s any of your business, but that’s not the point.
The point is that you have a great deal more freedom in the MS world than you do in the Apple world and that comes at a price. Part of the price is a steeper learning curve. Part of the price is the need for greater caution. But there are advantages as well. Like everything else . . . it’s a choice.
You’re right. Someday, let’s talk about the $65 return fee Apple chiseled from me for the iPhone that wouldn’t work on a system they said it would. That amounts to about $32.50 an hour rental on a nonfunctional but very very stylish brick.
Oh, but that has nothing to do with YOUR problem or it being globally Microsoft’s fault. My bad. Carry on.
One doesn’t have to be “pro Microsoft” to believe you’re full of shit. Ok, yes, I can believe you we’re having problems with their phone activation system, but you really need to understand that Windows and Office are some of the most widely pirated software out there. God forbid Microsoft try to do something to minimise that.
And what I said before stands. If you think trying to verify Office over the phone is bad, you’ve never dealt with jewels like FlexLM.
You shouldn’t be using either Apple or MS products.
Happy now?
(Both are giant sociopathic entities, one driven by anger at a collapsing monopoly, the other by a fatwa issued by its dead prophet. If you go near either, you should expect trouble. FOSS projects have their own issues, but at least they don’t treat you like a criminal by default.)
This is such a profoundly incorrect statement that I feel compelled to correct it. While the Quartz Compositor and the Cocoa API are proprietary, the underlying operating system to the OSX framework is called DarwinOS and is quasi-open source (available under the Apple Public Source License, which is not as “free” as the GNU GPL compliant) with the source code is freely downloadable. Apple has actually fed in-house developments back to the FreeBSD and OpenBSD developers. Although they’ve verged on closed architecture on iOS on a few occasions, they’ve ultimately opted to opening up the development toolkit and API (also freely downloadable for registered developers), albeit with compliance restrictions on apps that are distributed via the Apple App Store. Anyone familiar with *nix operating systems like Solaris, Irix, FreeBSD, or the various flavors of Linux can fire up a console, sudo commands as admin/root user (if they have system permissions set up to allow) and do any kind of modification or damage to any part of the system architecture. Apple has extremely well documented system APIs and is noted for providing good (if occasionally deferred) support for developers all the way down to the kernel level.
Contrast that with Windows, for which Microsoft does not provide source code (even to third party system security developers), does not allow direct access to the system kernel, and the most you can do is hack into the system registry and change settings with often unpredictable results. Microsoft APIs are notorious in their incomplete documentation, and the security measures and non-disclosure requirements that Microsoft imposes are pretty much the definition of “draconian” and paranoid.
This isn’t to say that Apple doesn’t have its share of flaws–iTunes, having become a dumping ground for a snowballing degree of individual functions, is becoming pretty bloated even natively on OSX, and some serious fumbles on iOS 6 are well deserving of the criticism they’ve received. And Microsoft, while not generally leading in technical innovations in security and scalability, has been savvy enough to lead the marketplace in desktop systems, and I have to admin that Windows 7 was a massive improvement over its predecessors that is almost comparable in usability and configurability (for a proficient user) to OSX or GNUStep. Performance is still an issue for Microsoft, but they have judged (more or less correctly) that increasing hardware performance will compensate for inefficiencies of the OS, while a need to maintain compatability with applications for prior releases has hobbled OSX to a certain extent.
As for the complaints of the OP, as a former sysadmin for high performance cluster systems running a multitude of licensing systems, I empathize completely, but I have yet to see any licensing scheme that was really foolproof or as flexible as I would like it to be. It is often possible to spoof a license server into thinking it is the machine that the license was registered to (I’ll leave the details as a research exercise for the user is this gets into ethically marginal territory) but it is often necessary to contact a vendor directly to reset or migrate a license to a new server or machine. Personally, for proprietary systems, I would like to see a dual key encryption arrangement where the license is periodically updated by the vendor so they can assure that their leased codes are not being misused, but no one has yet implemented my ideal arrangement in FlexLM or other codes. I will point out that for most user applications license-free applications of varying but typically very good quality exist (Google Docs, OpenOffice, NumPy/SciPy, et cetera), but it is hard to get people and businesses to adopt them if they’ve heavily invested in proprietary applications (Microsoft Office, Matlab).
As for Microsoft going bankrupt, well, never say never, but not in Bill Gates lifetime, certainly. They are sufficiently entrenched that it will take a computing revolution in which they totally miss the boat–the way IBM did with commodity PC hardware–before there is any danger that they’ll welch on their lease and up and vanish in the night, leaving Redmond holding the bag. Love or loath the company, it has been on the leading edge, commercially speaking, of desktop computing (and console gaming), and is likely to remain so as long as you still have a monitor sitting on a desk. Their entries into mobile and cloud computing, on the other hand, have left much to be desired, but I don’t expect them to disappear anytime soon.
I’ve gone through this a couple of times - uninstalled Office from one computer and installed it on another. And I had to do the activation over the phone, and answer (honestly) how many other computers this license is installed on. Worked fine every time.
The software is only a year old. How many times have you upgraded your hardware in the last 14 months?
You never need to de-activate. I rememberiTunes for a while had a limit and you’d have to authorize, I think five, it was, iirc, and then de-authorize them. MS activations don’t work like that. You just need to get a new activation approval.
Like Rhythmdvl, I’ve never had anything but great service calling MS’s activation number. Maybe call back tomorrow, during working hours and ask to speak to an operator.
Like when I bought an app on iTunes, that they soon after removed from iTunes, so if I want an update of software I purchased, I can either jaibreak my iPad or find another app to buy and hope that I’ll be allowed to update it before the douchebags at Apple decide I can’t?
If it’s a single-seat licence, I think you’ll get the ‘exceeded maximum number of computers’ response the first time you trip the hardware change detection (i.e. you have exceeded one licence seat).
I just checked the licence terms on Office for Mac (here: http://www.microsoft.com/About/Legal/EN/US/IntellectualProperty/UseTerms/Default.aspx) and it seems to acknowledge that hardware may be replaced and the licence transferred, but I think this is regarded as exceptional and so the automated licensing system is not going to be able to cope with it - in these cases, you need to speak with a human.
beowulff - there’s an activation help page herewith what I think might be a generic activation hotline - are there any numbers there different from the one you called? Were there any options to hold and speak to a human operator?
see this right here makes me suspicious as fuck, I mean who the hell owns a mac and has the skills to do things like turn screws and shit? everyone who owns a mac “knows” you have to get a new one when the old one breaks.
Not usually, no, but it depends on what all you’re replacing. CPU & motherboard changes are more likely to trigger it than hard drives. Even MS knows that hard drives get swapped around regularly. Just reinstalling Windows won’t necessarily trigger it, since it’s based on the hardware profile.
I’ve got a copy of MS Office 2010 (windows) and I’ve had it on two different machines through several updates and never needed to call for a new activation authorization. It still connects briefly when I first log in for the activation part, but I’ve never needed to get deal with manual activation for it.
Some of my older copies of Windows and Office I have needed to call though, after time.
I agree, there’s a certain level of hardware change that is accommodated within the system, but once that change is tripped, you’ll get a ‘licence limit exceeded’, if it’s a single-seat licence, because that ‘limit’ is 1. (And if it was a family pack, you just consume another licence, possibly without realising it).
