My biggest annoyance is that I specifically bought a Windows 11 license, from the MS store, using my MS account. I did this because I assumed that if something went wrong, I would always be able to recover it. I could never 'lose' the key if it was tied to my account.
Well unfortunately, MS screwed me. When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.
Despite having one license, one account, and one PC registered, MS refused to help. I tried to call support, but there are NO on-call support anymore. Only automated online support. No chat. Nothing. I tried over and over for a couple days and got nowhere.
Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.
If Microsoft can't do it, if Apple, Google, Facebook, X , OpenAI can't do it, then maybe we shouldn't allow companies to operate at scales which inevitably lead to widespread consumer harm.
They should be required to provide human customer service, with some sort of legal liability to ensure their products perform as advertised, without an end-user having to spend tens or hundreds of hours chasing down a solution, spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer, and all the rest of the hassle.
This is a legislation and regulation issue - the data barons are exploiting the effective absence of any accountability for harms they casually inflict on the public, ranging from gotcha situations like the OP to viral self harm trends among kids to mass surveillance and commercial invasion of privacy.
Pirate everything, support open source, pay content creators directly.
If they want to have billions of users, they damn well better be able to handle each and every one of those users in a commercially responsible fashion, or they have no business operating at that scale. We should be done with the "oops, we're too big and we make too much money to care that we just casually wrecked your life, oh well!" If the solution is to force users to have to buy a new PC, or a new phone, or create a new account, or anything in that vein, it's almost intentional, and casually malicious.
It's not like these companies don't know what they're doing, they can simply afford not to care. Until there's regulation and accountability that's more expensive than ignoring the consumer casualties, things will continue to get worse.
> Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.
The best way to do that would be for all the governments and large corporations that buy Windows machines for their employees to switch to Linux. That would probably end up cheaper in the long run. But nobody wants to sign up to be the one driving the switch.
Unless and until that happens, the unfortunate fact for individual Windows users is that you're rounding error in MS's numbers anyway. You're not the one they're making all the money from. The large government and corporate accounts are. And as long as people have to use Windows at work, they're going to use Windows at home because it's familiar to them. (Except for outliers like me who run Linux at home even though we have to use Windows at work. But those outliers are rounding error to the rounding error.)
> That would probably end up cheaper in the long run. But nobody wants to sign up to be the one driving the switch.
If memory serves, the French government (and various French municipalities) have been actively moving to Linux since the early 2000s. The French police even have their own Linux distribution, GendBuntu [1].
And yes, the reported cost savings are around 40% [2].
That just ends with everyone back in the same boat. Serious enterprises will still need OS support and no one is anywhere near prepared to challenge Microsoft for OS support contracts whether they be Linux, Windows, or otherwise.
> no one is anywhere near prepared to challenge Microsoft for OS support contracts
I don't think governments and large corporations are getting OS support from Microsoft. Certainly none of those I have worked for did so. The support people have to use MS tools, at least to some extent, but they're not MS employees and they have no inside connections with MS.
It's true that what "OS Support", or more generally "Supporting workstations for employees", would amount to would be different for a large organization that uses Linux, compared to what it is for a large organization that uses Windows. But "different" does not mean "worse". I would expect the quality of such support to be better once it sinks in that the organization means what it says about using open source solutions. And there are plenty of open source software projects that would love a huge influx of customers willing to pay for features (LibreOffice comes to mind, for example).
> I don't think governments and large corporations are getting OS support from Microsoft. Certainly none of those I have worked for did so
I’ve received excellent powershell-based support for their cloud services. I can’t imagine what I’d ask of them for OS support. If we can’t solve the issue in a timely fashion, we just reimage the device.
No, the best way would be to have legislation and regulation that mandates that level of service.
"Voting with your wallet" cannot solve every issue, and that's never been more true than today. Rampant hyperconsolidation means that there are no longer enough companies providing these products and services to have any real hope of being able to just switch to one that does what you need. Furthermore, even if you can find a solution that lets you stop giving them money—like switching to Linux—those solutions are not sufficient for the vast majority of people and institutions, and there's no way for enough to switch to actually hurt the megacorporations.
And even if it did start to hurt them, what do you think would happen? They'd say "oh, our bad, we'll be real nicey-nice now!"?
No; they'd flex their money muscles and find ways to make sure those institutional customers switched back.
The only ways to solve these problems are a) better regulations mandating an acceptable level of service and customer protection, and b) serious antitrust with real teeth. Break 'em up.
Unfortunately, neither of those are going to happen in the current political...situation.
I had the iPhone 3G back in 2008 and only had Android phones after that. Until 2020. But when trying to log into my old Apple account, it was asking for answers to security questions I’ve never setup because they weren’t a thing in 2008. After calling Apple support, my problem went up the ladder until someone called me and told me the way to do it. Try that with Google.
No, really. They're not perfect, and as time goes on I keep agonizing more and more about whether they're worth the money. But also, I've had some amazing customer support from Apple employees over the years, and I at least have to concede that the money for those people's salaries has to come from somewhere.
Also, divide the cost of the product by the replacement interval.
I have some landfill android tablets that are too slow to run the moral equivalent of flash games. The iPad’s I have (all low end models) are older than the androids (in one case, 2x older) and still work much better.
Retail price / years supported is pretty comparable for Apple and Android. On top of that, you can get deals on “discontinued” newly manufactured apple devices, and used ones as well.
I have many complaints about Apple, but value for money isn’t one of them.
Meanwhile, in computer land, it's not even at all. I use both a PC and a Mac at home. In the time since I bought the MacBook, I've had to replace the PC three times.
I did pay for some out of warranty repairs on the Mac about 5 years ago. (Keyboard and battery replacement.) So that evens the total cost of ownership situation a little bit. Having a PC has only cost me about twice as much as having a Mac over the past 10 years.
You should qualify that with “in your chosen location.” And there is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing to live where housing happens to be expensive.
It was a long time ago but more than once I had troubles with a Windows license and it was known that if you talked to somebody at Microsoft on the phone long enough they'd take pity on you and give you a new license key.
They're not really afraid that individuals are going to rip off Windows, they are afraid that system builders are going to rip off 20 copies of Windows for machines that they build. In fact, given that they are so into Azure and GAME PASS and all sorts of thing you've never heard of, Windows might just be a loss leader.
Every time I call Apple customer service, they tell me to box up my device and send it in to be replaced. The human element is nice but it's hardly a panacea - you need trained customer support.
It's not the computer that Microsoft is selling, it's Windows. It's apples and oranges (no pun intended). Apple doesn't charge for its software and Microsoft has many other products. It's just about how you distribute your costs.
FWIW, Microsoft has a much higher profit margin than Apple.
Id argue that at this point, Microsoft isn't selling Windows. They're selling everything/anything touching their platform.
Copilot, Office, Azure, gamepass. Almost all of these have a yearly subscription price that exceeds or is close to that of a Windows license. Windows just happens to be the platform they use to get you in.
>Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.
The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
> The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
The key words are monopoly and lock-in. Those things can really scramble the bad vs good equation.
> Does Microsoft actually have a monopoly on anything these days? Maybe gaming? I saw its like 95% windows on Steam.
Monopoly doesn't always mean 100% of the market. They're still the leader by far in desktop operating systems, and pretty much everyone who has a computer as work has an Office license allocated to them.
No, that's not the reality of the situation. You are theorizing a perfect market with no costs of entry or exit. Customer demand for critical systems is inelastic to start with due to technical burden (ie most people are not good enough with computers to casually switch OS), and large vendors work hard to maximize that inelasticity.
No I don't. If meant that I would have written it. Most people are not competent to change out an operating system and find the idea of developing that competency unattractive and expensive. Many people not only do not understand how computers work, they don't want to. If they do switch to something different, it's usually via a purchase rather than DIY.
> they find the idea of developing that competency unattractive
You are repeating exactly what I'm saying you're saying. They could develop that competency. They don't want to because the juice isn't worth the squeeze. They are not motivated enough because it's not important enough to them.
> If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
The problem is that while this is true, in practice it's more like the mandate of heaven than laissez-faire economics. When political power structures are involved, and thus the status quo itself is reliant on the omnipresence of certain economic forces, there can never be a drawdown under normal market forces. There is an intentional, exerted force which unbalances the equation in favor of the monoliths. "Enough of a problem" ends up becoming violent social upheaval. In effect, you advocate for normalizing the driver to aim our societal bus off the cliff because "somebody hasn't grabbed the steering wheel yet, so it's clearly an acceptable course." Discounting the fact that the co-driver is pointing a machine gun at the back of the bus.
Adam Smith would be absolutely apalled that we let things get this bad. This isn't what he wrote about at all. The free market is about economic coordination, not letting massive entities do whatever they damn well please at the expense of a society's quality. This is neo-mercantilism, the exact kind of thing he was vehemently disgusted with.
I think a good metaphor for the situation is that the US is like a tank and regulations are like armour on that tank.
It can both be true that the US has too many regulations (the tank has too much armour) and that it's in the wrong spots (too much armour in the back and not on the front.)
America needs less regulations in some scenarios, and more regulations in others. It may very well end up that the net result of these combined changes is less overall regulation and also more effective regulation.
If you care about high quality products we can start with the OP article and how this system, which is most definitely not capitalism as intended, has directly entailed this nosedive of enshittification for absolutely superfluous and nonsensical reasons. The Soviets succumbed to the exact same mistake, I'm not sure why you would bring them up.
I presume you live in a capitalist society. That means you are free to start your own business and avoid enshittification and nonsense.
Me, I started a game business because nobody else made the game I wanted to play. I started a compiler business because I didn't like the available compilers. I designed a new programming language because the existing languages were not good enough.
I think perhaps it's my fault for how I worded that reply, but to clarify it has scarcely little to do with products at all. They don't matter. I sure hope you still can make your own tools to your hearts desire, but that's not going to fix anything and it never will. I'll emphasize I'm still confused at your first reply, which reads like a non-sequitur to me, and this second reply makes me think we're having wildly different conversations, so I think I'll just leave it at that.
> Adam Smith would be absolutely appalled that we let things get this bad. This isn't what he wrote about at all. The free market is about economic coordination, not letting massive entities do whatever they damn well please at the expense of a society's quality. This is neo-mercantilism, the exact kind of thing he was vehemently disgusted with.
One problem is that the ambient propaganda has changed the definition of capitalism to exactly the problematic one you describe, so that arguing for a more sensible balance of the kind that Smith and others described is taken as an attack on capitalism itself.
These days I'm reminded more and more often of Wimp Lo from Kung Pow! Enter the Fist: "We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke." Except people have been trained wrong to make them better targets for farming their capital.
They should be required to provide human customer service, with some sort of legal liability to ensure their products perform as advertised, without an end-user having to spend tens or hundreds of hours chasing down a solution, spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer, and all the rest of the hassle.
Apple (which you mention earlier) do. I've used their live support at any time of the day to solve issues whether it be a software glitch or having trouble using something I just purchased. The only company that comes close to this level of streamlined, anytime support, is American Express.
If customers just start bugging Microsoft devs directly as though they are customer support (which…technically they should be since they built the product) then maybe productivity would grind to a halt. When all the MBAs running the show start seeing all their JIRA dashboards full bad news then perhaps they’ll think twice?
Heck if the McDonald’s CEO and family were required by law to eat their own McDonald’s product for 80%+ of daily caloric/macro intake, then we would probably see things change quickly.
Companies that can’t run at a particular scale should definitely not be enabled to do so. But sadly, we seem to not hold them accountable, directly.
Building a product doesn't magically change your role. Devs are not customer support.
What you're saying is basically that the ability to do a task means you technically should do that task. I can definitely mop, but that doesn't make me a janitor, not even technically.
Worse, a software dev may have no experience with IT-style troubleshooting. I've seen this first-hand. And there's no telling what assumptions they might make about how much users do or do not know when offering advice.
>>>Heck if the McDonald’s CEO and family were required by law to eat their own McDonald’s product for 80%+ of daily caloric/macro intake, then we would probably see things change quickly.
Hamurabbi's code: An architect, or equivalent next of kin, was put to death , if the building he had built killed the owner, or a kin of the owner.
This is why we have courts and judges, to hear complaints and issue remedies when the defendants are unwilling to do so. A better solution would be to reign in arbitration agreements, which are horribly inefficient. Arbitration purports to be lest costly, but it encourages unnecessary litigation by preventing the operation of res judicata, it increases the costs of litigation by preventing class actions, etc. It increases injuries by keeping wrongdoers conduct confidential.
How about giving less profit to the shareholders? How about making customer support legally mandated so companies don't have the "greedy shareholder" excuse?
There is a range between less profit and no profit. As a shareholder, I'd rather have a functional society for all at the cost of a bit less profit, rather than being the richest in a world of ashes.
You really are on the side of letting companies steamroll customers throughout this thread. There's what's technically true, and there's the society most of us would prefer to inhabit. I want mine to be less extractive of profits by any means necessary.
Australia has very strong consumer protection laws but international companies still sell products here. They are forced to comply with the regulations and the prices are mostly comparable with other countries. Regulations work.
Australia's startup scene is doing ok, but the funding model is lacking. There are a few reputable VCs, and very limited government funding. I don't think it's regulations that are cramping Australian startups, I think it's more lack of investment from both private and public sectors. I know many people who are running successful startups in Australia.
I'd argue that having a system of lobbying government and lax rules on political donations would have a much greater effect on stymying competition. It seems that monopolies in the US are very much protected by a lack of regulation on political donations rather than too much regulation.
> I'd argue that having a system of lobbying government and lax rules on political donations would have a much greater effect on stymying competition.
Interesting. My belief is that regulations are the most harmful since they raise barriers to startup competition and thus protect monopolies (since startups, due to their hunger, are the most important source of competition in a market - incumbents usually end up in monopolies and cartels instead). We're seeing that here in the EU every day.
But let's explore your point: how exactly do you think lobbying and donations are stymying competition? What's the mechanism at work?
The mechanism is as old as the hills. You pay for favourable conditions for your business, and unfavourable conditions for your competitors. Australia has a classic history of political figures being given very comfortable jobs in the private sector after they've greased the wheel for their largest donors. This applies to tech, communications, finance, property development and probably every other money making sector.
When contracts are awarded to companies based on lobbying and donations it stymies competition.
The following quote is from the report linked at [1]. It's worth reading the entirety of that report.
"the growing politicisation of public service, exemplified by political appointments to government bodies (Griffiths et al. 2022), may spill over into the contract market. Links between politics, donations, and contracts may negatively impact competition and firm entry".
What you are describing is how governments prop-up incumbents. But this rarely apply to startups, who seldom stand a chance at getting government contracts and the like. Entrepreneurs will ignore those and build the startup from the bottom up, with small customers first.
Of course a less corrupt government could help here, like the x-prize helped SpaceX and electric car subsidies helped Tesla. But that's too much to ask from politicians of most countries.
To actually prevent startups competing and disrupting the market, I maintain that regulations are much more effective: they will prevent entrepreneurs from even thinking of entering and competing highly regulated domains. See the three canonical examples (health care, education and housing) where high prices and scarcity are the name of the game.
I think we're debating around the actual core of the issue: Regulations are only as good or bad as the content of the regulations, and corrupt governments can (and do) ignore and enact regulations at their pleasure.
Ideally, regulations can promote startups and overall market competition. We do see that ideal in some Australian regulations (and I would guess in most countries) but regulations are decided by the government, and that means that their enforcement (or lack thereof) and intent is often pro-incumbent.
I still maintain that regulations on political lobbying and donations would go a long way to open up the playing field for startups. Unfortunately, I don't see any evidence of any political party in any country doing more than pay lip service to actually doing this.
Have computer prices gotten considerably cheaper since the days when companies had human support employees? Some components have gotten considerably more expensive, so it seems like they haven't, at least on average.
Relatively speaking yes. My Macintosh Quadra 605 was around $1000 in 1994 and was a low end model at the time. Today that $1000 would be around $2100 or so. I can get an entry level MacMini for $499.
Yeah; a better comparison would be with a current generation AI workstation. I’ll randomly go with Razer, since they look pretty and are shipping 5090’s with high-end AMD processors.
With many products, every contact a customer makes with customer service is an opportunity to profit. However, it requires quite a mindset to appreciate this.
You can rig your product reviews by providing above and beyond customer service, for example, warranty claims dealt with in a day with a replacement in the post arriving as if by magic to surprise the customer. Hit them up for a review and they will write a review with meaning, explaining how you fixed their problem, exceeding all expectations. Unless you have done this then you would never know. Although most companies do collect reviews, they don't know the way to do it is to get reviews from the customers that complained rather than the ones that didn't. It is very counterintuitive.
You can always upsell. If the customer has problems with the product then maybe they need a different product or a whole suite of stuff. With software you can always give trials too. Complaining about what comes with Windows? Maybe you need Office. Here you go, a three month trial to tide you over.
Customer service should also be the eyes and ears of the company, to alert product and sales teams to any problems with new products so corrections can be made very quickly.
It is also about having customers for life. It is more cost effective to retain the customers you have rather than churn them.
All of this applies regardless of the company size. There are some caveats though. Nothing can be queued unduly, queues don't save time for anyone and you still have to get all of that queued work done. This means you need team members that work from both the front and the back of the queue, to have a clean queue by the end of day.
If you get it right then customer service is not a cost, it is the exact opposite, at the heart of marketing due to word of mouth goodness that can't be bought so easily. If you can get the upsells to work too, then a customer service department can pay its own way, to profit even.
You also have to recruit people that will go above and beyond. Lots of people have hectic lives with kids and other obligations that make their lives unpredictable. They will need days off, special working hours and other niceties, however, give them a job that they can fit around their life and they will show gratitude with loyalty and hard work.
There are cultural problems why this 'bring it on' approach is not so common. Usually customer service are down there with the pigeons in corporate pecking order. In reality, customer service needs to be at the heart of the company with more than lip service given to the 'customer first' idea.
With companies giving customer service over to AI chatbots, there is plenty of opportunity for companies of all sizes, including Microsoft, to resist the AI temptation and get serious about customer service.
For the most part customer service is excellent from Swedish government agencies. There are exceptions with either poorly run or intentionally refunded agencies where it is not the case but usually the quality of customer service is excellent.
What you do is have a real capitalist system with decent antitrust protections and real market competition instead a crony capitalist system where oligopolies can easily push regulators and legislators around.
And then, once you have enabled consumers to vote with their money, they will.
You've got the sheep and the wolf in sheep's clothing mixed up.
This kind of oligopolism, rent-seeking behavior, and general corruption are some of the problems capitalism was invented to fix. And the further societies stray away from actively defending a strong market economy, the more those problems start to come back.
Now come on. A basic level of support would not cost Microsoft $9900 - that's absurd to suggest. It may reduce their profit margins a bit, or they may have to increase the price, but it's not like Microsoft has earning problems.
> When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.
This happened to me too! It's absolutely insane that a license I bought through my account can't be transferred somehow...
My newest NUC is somehow recognized by Windows 11 as being entitled to a copy, and I can reinstall on it repeatedly while keeping the activation, so at least we've got that going for us.
But after Proton, all the machines in my house exclusively run Linux. I sincerely hope I never touch a windows machine again for the rest of my life :)
I so wish I could move to Linux, but I extensively use Windows computers via RDP and the Linux RDP clients are just so bad on my eyes. I tried Remmina, rdesktop and FreeRDP. Maybe NX would be a good option but I can't install NX on all of the computers I use. I guess I should shut-up and try to contribute to those projects to make them better.
Have you looked into Rustdesk? The setup isn't complicated, it's basically TeamViewer but local. It provided me with a way better quality than anything VNC based on linux.
When did you last try Remmina (which uses FreeRDP as the backend btw)? Ever since FreeRDP got updated to V3, the RDP experience improved significantly. I use it every day for work stuff and it's been great - folder sharing works, clipboard works, so does audio forwarding and DPI scaling. Oh and RemoteApps too. Honestly I've got zero complaints with it.
A couple of weeks ago. My employer provided a new computer which I loaded with Fedora. I found the colors on Remmina really saturated and harsh. I loaded Win11 because I really disliked it. But, I will try Fedora again since I need to reinstall Win11 due to an account problem I can’t resolve.
I use Remmina all the time. It did take some tinkering but if you play with compression and bit depth settings, you should be able to get it working better. I think even cuddling with the encryption settings helped as well.
> NUC is somehow recognized by Windows 11 as being entitled to a copy
There's some form of "BIOS-attached license". Don't really know how it works, but I've seen this for many years. Basically all PCs that have the Windows logo have that, and you can install windows on them as many times as you like, without ever having to enter a license key (I suppose this is limited to the same edition level - I've only ever tried this on "enterprise-level" machines that came with windows pro).
This even works for machines that originally came with windows 8 to install 10, and 10 -> 11. I've never tried "forcing" a win11 install on any machine that came with win8.
Yep, device activated vs user activated. It makes sense to have the option in large environments but they really screw end users on this stuff. MS licensing is insane, I have to deal with it at work, and it's unbelievably complicated. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I run Linux at home too. Its annoying, but I sometimes need to run Windows in a WM for Word, as the online version is crap on large complex documents where formatting matters, and interoperability with colleagues keeps me from using LibreOffice Write.
Have you checked out OnlyOffice (not to be confused with OpenOffice)? It's MSO file format compatibility is vastly superior to LibreOffice, I use it work on files shared by colleagues using MSO and it works fine for the most part.
The only issue I faced is with embedded ActiveX/VBA, like forms in a Word doc that might use radio buttons will get converted to static images. If you don't have weird stuff like that in your docs then you should be fine.
I have. Its not bad at all. I also agree that it has better file compatibility. The main thing I came across is that not all the features that I expect are implemented yet, at least in their powerpoint/presentation application.
Another issue that I face is that it is increasingly expected that their would be a shared Word document in OneDrive that multiple people can be working on simultaneously. Its really hard to win sometimes when the infrastructure is all against it. :(
I was in this same situation earlier this year with one machine that was using a license attached to my Microsoft account. From what I read online, I thought I was freeing up the license by running "slmgr /upk" and "slmgr /cpky" on the old machine, but I guess not. I was eventually able to get the license transferred to the new machine, but only after a very painful morning of working with an MS support person.
I learned that there are two ways of buying a Windows 11 license. One way results in getting a traditional license key that can be reliably transferred, and the other way (tying the license to your Microsoft account) risks losing your license. :( I'm very careful to only buy licenses the former way, now.
It's just a matter of buying from the right web page at Microsoft's web site. At least as of June, I was able to buy a license with a traditional license key here:
Last I ever bothered to buy a CD key I got it off one of those gaming key sites. I have since moved on to Linux, but you can get a Pro key really cheap on those sites. I refuse to overspend to upgrade what should have been a computer with Windows Pro OOTB. If you spend over 2 grand on any computer you should not be getting Windows Home edition.
I guess if things get ugly they have some (terrible) plausible deniability? “What do you mean my $10 Windows Enterprise key is stolen? I thought that was the going rate. Linux is free”
Both. Microsoft would probably never go after the buyer, but I just wondered the justification people buying from the grey market are - legally speaking in many places, you're just paying money to pirate it - it's not a valid license.
I had a similar issue recently and was able to convince the AI agent to give me a phone number to talk to a support representative. They manually fixed my accout and key and gtg in a few minutes.
I have two Minecraft accounts, several Live.com accounts accrued over the years, and a smattering of Github accounts for various reasons (professional, self-employed, personal),
Logging into Minecraft java a week ago took me 7 logins across various different accounts -- and then it ALSO uses Xbox for auth, which I never set up. And then, the endpoint is blocked for my ISPs IP range so I had to use a VPN and try from a few locations. Bless you, Ohio.
Join the club.
They 'stole' three Minecraft accounts from me.
I tried their migration tool separately and all they were able to tell me was that old chestnut, "something happened".
I could, and maybe I should, but it's just too much effort, time, and money. It's not worth what I paid for the license. If the license was $10k that would be different.
Oddly, I have never bothered to buy a Windows 11 license and somehow do not have any issues with using Windows 11 on any of my computers. Some upgraded, some built from scratch.
So the problem is that MS isn't even consistent about how it enforces licenses.
I wish it worked like that! Sadly, it does not. That's why I was using a MS account login instead of a local username/password - I thought that it would be 'automatic'. No such luck.
Wow, this must be a recent change. My license somehow was disassociated from my machine. I was able to get someone to fix it over the phone after some basic troubleshooting. It was a little annoying it happened at all, but at least they fixed it.
Somehow my decade plus expired MSDN licensed Windows keys are still working like champs across multiple machine activations. I think at this point if they stopped working I'd just drop Windows altogether.
This seems like a situation where you could run a pirate kms server and license yourself. I imagine you would gave a strong case should it come to trial.
Can't. As I said, they don't have any on-phone support anymore. I tried for a couple days but it's not possible to reach a human anymore. No keywords like 'representative' work now. The try to offer automated support or redirect you to webpages, but that's it.
Well unfortunately, MS screwed me. When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.
Despite having one license, one account, and one PC registered, MS refused to help. I tried to call support, but there are NO on-call support anymore. Only automated online support. No chat. Nothing. I tried over and over for a couple days and got nowhere.