Four years ago, I told you why I would never again leave the driving to Greyhound .
Today I would like to tell you why I will never again use a Microsoft product. No more Word, no more Excel, no more PowerPoint. No more contributing to Bill Gates’s pension plan.
Here’s the reason. My copy of Office for Mac 2011 is incompatible with macOS Sierra – the latest version of Apple’s operating system – and the Microsoft people won’t do anything about it.
I asked them, twice, for a product key to activate Office 2011 in Sierra. They refused me, twice. Instead, they said I should buy a copy of Office 2016, which would cost me $299 CAD, or I could subscribe to Office 365 on a year-to-year basis for $182.40 annually.
Neither option was satisfactory. I paid $149 for this Office suite, it worked fine with all the previous iterations of the Apple operating system, and I shouldn’t have to pay anything more for it to work with the current system.
I said this in a letter to Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella. (In case you’re wondering, I wrote the letter with Pages, Apple’s word processing program.) I told Mr. Nadella I’d been a regular customer of Microsoft since I purchased my first computer – a Macintosh Classic – in 1991, and I didn’t think I should have to pay anything more to get my current version of Office up and running again.
That was a month ago. Mr. Nadella did not reply. So goodbye Microsoft. Forever.
Just so you know, I never received a reply either from Greyhound’s Canadian vice-president, Stuart Kendrick. But I did receive a number of messages from former passengers who had similar bad experiences with the company. Like me, they too will never use Greyhound again. If they are Mac owners, they probably won’t use Microsoft products either.