Microsoft → Re: When your PC dies, so does your Office 2013 license

It does actually make a lot of sense from a sellers perspective (or rather a rent / lease perspective). For example, my cable company won't allow the customer to buy and own a cable box. This means in the 10 to 12 years or so that I've been a subscriber I've paid the value of the two cable boxes many times over in rental fees,.....and still don't own the boxes,.....

I'd have to take a look at Microsoft's model carefully to see how well it would work for me but I have no doubt that it works well for them.

I could see how this could work to push people off of older software though which is something Microsoft and other companies have wanted to do for some time.

It may be more practical from another angle. How many Office CDs do they package and ship that go unsold? They might believe they're reducing a lot of waste this way.

Actually, if you look at some of the packaging for the 2013 'Click to Run' products (Office family of products) all that's included in the box is:
#1 - a card that says "go to this site ....." and enter the 25-character product key that is on the other card in this box.
#2 - a smaller card with the 25-character product key.

The box isn't even large enough to hold a CD/DVD. This all in turn pushes you to set up a "Live" account complete with SkyDrive where they keep a list of your purchased software for installation.

Now there is a way to force the installation to be completely set up on your local hard drive, but the default install is "click to run" meaning that if you use a feature not yet installed, you must be connected to the internet to get that feature to work at that time.

Yes, Microsoft is definitely focused on a "cloud" based model, and this leads to the Software/Storage as a Service annual "service fee", i.e. subscription fees to continue using your software and accessing your cloud stored data.

There are other issues involved with all of this that haven't been touched on yet - especially in the "cloud file storage" arena. Just one of which is where is your data physically stored? The actual physical location of the data center affects things like who can look at it - consider a data center located in a country such as China or Iran. Do you think U.S. or other tight privacy laws mean anything to those folks? Additional concerns for businesses or anyone storing sensitive information are security and backup of that data by the provider.

Ok, enough poking at the hornet's nest, must actually go earn my dollar-two-ninety-eight now.

Enjoy!