In yet another move guaranteed to alienate users, Microsoft has decided to make using its new version of Office more difficult and expensive.

Until Office 2013, it’s been possible to transfer the software from one computer to another, and to re-install it on an upgraded computer. Microsoft even allowed people who used Office at work to install and use it on their home computers as well. This sort of realistic flexibility made it a lot easier to justify the rather hefty price tag for Office.

Unfortunately, with Office 2012, one set of Office media will be wedded to one particular computer forever. Non-transferable; one computer only.

As Peter Bright rightly points out in the post linked above, this penalizes a particular segment of computer users: the enthusiast. This includes a lot of the people who write about software and computers, so Microsoft can expect a lot more public backlash against this decision, as well as a general increase in the move away from MS Office toward alternatives like Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice, NeoOffice, and Google Docs. Any conceivable increase in revenue stemming from this decision will be outweighed by these losses.

It seems clear that Microsoft is hell bent on driving away enthusiast/hobbyist/power users. Windows 8 is another example of Microsoft’s hostility toward power users.