[citation][nom]SteelCity1981[/nom]wow if this is the case microsoft is going to lose a lot of costumers for their office suite. Can you imagine spending 300 dollars on a office 2013 suite and your hard drive crashed and you had to go buy a new hard drive, just to find out you also had to buy another 300 dollar copy office 2013 suite again![/citation]
Not quite right. If you replace a HDD then you simply reinstall your office suite like normal. No big deal.
The company I work for is a refurbisher and MS looks at a machine as the housing/case + motherboard/CPU (and even the CPU can usually be replaced without issue). So unless something has changed (which I doubt) then you are talking about still having the ability to change/upgrade/replace most aspects of a machine, so long as the core devices (case, mobo, cpu) are all still present and accounted for.
If the system fails and needs a new motherboard and you have an OEM license, then it is typically just a simple chat with MS to explain that the system died, and the change in motherboard is due to a replacement, and not a new build. I would imagine that this new license scheme is very similar.
For laptop users this is rough as it is rarely worth fixing a system, so most of the time you simply replace it, which in this case would also mean a new copy of Office. For desktop users though, MS has always been quite lenient. The problem that MS has is that PC (desktop) hardware is so fluid that there is no practical way for them to know if your 5 year old system died, and so you replaced it with modern parts as a repair, or if you simply upgraded the system without a failure, or if you replaced the system entirely with a fresh new build. MS is not about to call their customers liars and thieves, so they have typically let system builders get away with just about anything. It will be interesting with these new policies to see if they continue to do this, or if MS will crack down on it and stop letting users abuse the system. I remember when XP Home came out there was a lot of worry because MS would only allow users to upgrade up to 3 major hardware components over a 4 (or 6?) month period. But there was no way for them to properly enforce it, so it never really became a problem. Will this be much the same? Or does MS have new tricks up their sleeve?
Still, the new Office terms absolutely suck. Office (Home and Student anyways) use to be good for 3 devices for $140. I personally use it on 2, and found it to be a fair deal. But now I 'get' to pay the exact same price PER MACHINE rather than per household. That is a raw deal. I am not about to drop $280 on Office to upgrade us from 2007. I typically upgrade every 2 revisions (~6 years), and I was prepared to pay my $140 for Office Home and Student 2013 for my home... but I am not going to sit down and pay 2x as much for something that is largely a cosmetic upgrade.
Office 365 is not a bad deal as you are allowed to have it on up to 5 devices at a time, and those devices can change over time, and you get the entire office suite plus extra Skydrive space. With the old way of doing things then we are talking about a $500 office suite per machine every 3 years, plus $20/yr for the added skydrive space. Instead you are talking about $300 over the same period, for 5 machines instead of 1. That is a phenomenal deal for families with kids who have their own computers! You would be nearly foolish to not jump on this if you had the 5 machines to put it on.
Only problem for me is that I do not purchase the full Office suite, I purchase Home and Student, and even then only every 6 years. So then we are talking about jacking up my actual costs of using office up by $460 over a 6 year period. That is not such a great deal, so no thank you! When MS comes out with an Office 365 package with 20GB of skydrive for $40/yr for 2 machines then I will consider it. Even if they charged $50/yr for 2-3 machines I would probably jump on it, but $100 for the 'privileged' of using it on machines that don't exist is silly.
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