Microsoft Office and MAKs
I do most of my work on OS X, and that includes all my word processing. So the world of Microsoft Office's rather odd volume licensing scheme was, up to now, something I was blissfully unaware of. Recently though I had to do some IT work for a small company. They said they wanted their company's MS Office installed on some new laptops they had purchased. One problem: they had lost the installation CD. But they had kept a note of their licence key (it was, according to the scribbled note left by the no-longer-working-there IT bod, a "MAK key for Office 2010 Professional"). Easy, I thought. No doubt you seasoned MS folks are shaking your head at my ignorance, but on Mac and Linux having no discs is usually a benefit - they are always out-of-date anyway. Get your installers from the internet. So off I went and downloaded a trial version of Office 2010. All I needed to do was enter the key and it'd work, right? Wrong. "Your licence key is invalid." Hm