Office 2013 Retail Box CAN Be Moved To New PC’s and Is No Longer Tied To the Hardware

From the good people at TheRegister:

In a reversal of its previously announced policy, Microsoft says it is altering the terms of the retail Office 2013 license to remove the clause that permanently tied each installation of the suite to a single PC.

“Based on customer feedback we have changed the Office 2013 retail license agreement to allow customers to transfer the software from one computer to another,” Microsoft’s Jevon Fark said in a blog post on Wednesday. “This means customers can transfer Office 2013 to a different computer if their device fails or they get a new one.”

Fark says the updated license applies to Office Home and Student 2013, Office Home and Business 2013, Office Professional 2013, and the individual, boxed Office 2013 applications.

Under the original terms of the license, which came to light in February as copies of the suite began shipping to customers, Office 2013 was licensed to the computer it was installed on, not to the user who installed it.

That meant that once installed, the software could never be transferred to any other PC. Customers couldn’t even re-install the suite onto a new PC when they upgraded, or if their old computer was damaged