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.<p>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.<p>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!
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.<p>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.
How do you define device? The CPU? The storage? The specific instance of the install?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus</a>
This is why I hate DRM. I want to be able to use my software forever.<p>If it's technically and culturally capable of doing so, the manufacturer has an economic incentive to <i>want</i> 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.<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/Ei5wx1V.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/Ei5wx1V.png</a>
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.<p>Looks like the pricing is more confusing (and higher) for 2013 though.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>Do yourself a solid and give it a test drive.