One of my biggest,Microsoft’s Licensing Model (sigh) Articles most important responsibilities in my day job is ensuring
that we have purchased all of the software licenses that we require. It’s
my job to ensure that we are 100% legal at all times – which fulfills one of
our corporate goals to be a completely ethical company.
Most companies make it very simply 춘천op for me and my staff. If I want to license
Norton Antivirus, all I need to do is count the number of machines on which
the product is to be installed, write up a purchase order and call the
salesperson to order the product. It works the same with Conversion Plus,
Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, WinZIP and any of the other hundreds of
products that we require to keep our company in business.
You would think that Microsoft would want to make it easy for people like me
to give them money. I know that if I were in their shoes that’s what I would
do.
I should stop for a minute and explain that I love many Microsoft products.
Windows 2000 (server and professional) are very solid, well-thought-out
operating systems, and the Office 2000 suite is easily the best in the
industry. Internet Explorer is far superior to Netscape and has been for
several years now, and Visio 2000 is one of the most versatile flowcharting
tools available anywhere.
Unfortunately, purchasing and licensing Microsoft products is nowhere near
as pleasurable as using their office suite. My god, they make it so
difficult to purchase licenses that I’ve often considered (especially
recently) switching the entire company to Unix and WordPerfect just to
simplify my life.
Okay, let’s take the Office suite of products. In a sane world, you would do
this one of three ways:
– You could just buy everything (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and so on)
– You could purchase the “base” kit, then purchase additional licenses for
the pieces that you needed. For example, spend $75 on the base, then add $40
for Word, and perhaps $10 for PowerPoint, and then don’t purchase Access.
This could all be done with a licensing key.