On Thursday 04 November 2004 4:30 pm, Paul Tansom wrote:
...and a right PITA it is too even if you want a new machine *with* a Microsoft OS. The hassle I have trying to explain to customers that want a new machine that even though they have a copy of Windows 98 and Office 97 that they are quite happy to continue using, they are not allowed to and I am forced to sell them new copies of the software at a higher cost than the hardware they are purchasing. Add to that the problems when you explain that because they have been forced to purchase a new OS this will have to be Windows XP, which in turn will force them to upgrade some of their other software because it won't work with the newer version of Windows. In some cases this has a knock on effect on the server side software being used for an (e.g. accounting) package, which will then force an upgrade there too. This will then force upgrades of the client software on the other machines, which may not be capable of running the new client without a hardware and OS upgrades themselves. One failing machine could force a major upgrade of the whole system simply because of Microsoft's licensing policy - very, very nasty!
Oh I hear you, been there many a time.
A good one recently was a new customer that had approached us after installing Small Business Server 2003, each CAL with SBS comes with a licence to run Outlook 2003, in fact the server will happily install this for you the first time each client logs in.
The customer approached us because since the upgrade to SBS2003 from SBS4.5 several usefull features (like mail merge and "send to mail recipient") had become broken.
The only answers I could come up with were a. To manually remove Outlook 2003 and roll back to an older version on each machine (anybody that has tried this will tell you how hard it is to get old versions of Outlook running properly after a machine has become "infected" with a newer version) or b. To purchase new copies of Office for each client.
and don't get me started on how many people think that Word,Excel etc are part of the operating system and will be installed by default on every new machine.