Given the precautions I take and the checks I made at the time, including scanning the machine in question for malware using an independent, known good boot disc, that seems unlikely. It would require a firmware-level infection or a stealthy infection that could hide from multiple malware scanners, either way exhibiting no apparent symptoms before or since, to cause the clash you're suggesting.

And we're currently exploring our options for a move, due in no small part to the poor on-line banking at the current place. Sadly, it turns out that many of the alternatives are also bad one way or another, and in almost every case it takes a crazy amount of effort even to arrange a sensible discussion about possibly moving new business to a bank. Since we're talking about small businesses here, so the same people who need to deal with the banks also need to do real work that brings in revenues and pays everyone's salaries, it's a painfully slow process.

It would be interesting to see what specialist lawyers in various jurisdictions would make of that argument.

If when you use the software you also rely on any permission granted by the EULA that you wouldn't otherwise have, this could be instant game-over if it was considered to imply that you had agreed to the EULA as a contract for that reason instead. And if you explicit agreed to the EULA to download the software in the first place, that's probably instant game-over as well. But if you were relying on the EULA only as a licence, not as a contract, and you were not doing anything that requires more than that licence, it does seem like claiming that you infringed copyright instead might be a reasonable position.

However, a more promising alternative, rather than accepting that you've done anything wrong or consented to anything dubious at all just because some dubious EULA term claimed you did, might be to consider recent changes to the legal position in some jurisdictions. Particularly in Europe, many of the usual complaints about EULAs have been considered more thoroughly in recent years, and in some cases laws have been or are being changed to clarify consumer rights in terms of software, downloaded content, and related areas.

That debate typically starts with the perennial question of whether an EULA necessarily creates any binding contract at all, and if it does, whether the terms of such a contract are fair. It looks like the direction we're heading, at least in Europe and more specifically the UK, is that EULA-as-contract can be valid as a general principle, but then those agreements are also subject to the full weight of consumer protection laws just like any other consumer contract. That means a general requirement for fairness in the terms, various more specific protections like prohibiting certain exclusions entirely, and hopefully also the power for regulators to step in preemptively where unfair terms are present, even if those terms are void anyway, so no more incorporating scary-sounding but unenforceable terms to try to divert consumers from exercising their legal rights.

Something like what you describe should be the norm, and modern operating systems should enforce strict scoping rules for different applications and data. It shouldn't even be possible for a lot of these DRM or anti-cheat systems to work, because they fundamentally rely on doing shady things that no application should ever be allowed to do by the host OS.

Sadly, no mainstream desktop OS defaults to working this way, which makes your perfectly logical response also an unrealistic one for the vast majority of users, who lack your technical skills.

That's an improvement, but in many cases a better answer will be "Don't work from home at all, and if your employer doesn't like it, find a better employer".

The way it's just taken for granted that a lot of staff will continue to work outside office hours is a damning indictment of employment culture in some places today. This is just like the debate over BYOD vs. employers providing a separate company phone, where it is often taken as axiomatic that everyone needs company stuff on a phone somewhere so their boss can hassle them out of hours. If you're explicitly on call, and being compensated accordingly, fair enough. Otherwise...

I've no problem with you taking that position. Personally I also don't bother with sites if they don't work properly with my ad/spyware blocking choices. I'm just saying that we should accept that a lot of people just don't care about these issues for whatever reason, and that some businesses are going to make more money from those people by adding the junk than they are going to lose from people like us going elsewhere.

For individuals, probably not, at least not if you're somewhere like Europe where consumer protection and data protection laws tend to be taken reasonably seriously. I'm not sure how I'd rate my chances in most US jurisdictions without real legal advice, though.

For businesses, it could be a completely different story. For example, here in the UK, there are blanket consumer protection rules that make unfair contract terms unenforceable, but those rules do not extend to business-to-business contracts. Arguing that you didn't agree to something that appears in the EULA as a business would be harder, and it's still your responsibility to comply with whatever rules applied to you before about confidentiality, data protection and the like. This could leave you with literally no safe position to take, legally speaking, once you've installed this software.

Luckily, those of us running businesses don't need to worry about this, because the regulators probably won't let banks assign liability for fraudulent use of our accounts to us if it was their own negligence or incompetence that resulted in any losses.

Oh, no, wait. That was for personal bank accounts used by private individuals. As a business, the situation is unlikely to be a happy one if anyone does compromise your accounts because of these kinds of obvious security problems and you lose money because of it.

I've actually met small business owners who refuse to use on-line banking to this day because of this one issue. Personally, my businesses treat on-line banking as a business risk, keep careful records as we do with anything, but refuse to use Rapport since it has been found to destabilise our systems.

It wasn't alarmist when Rapport compromised the integrity of the computer I use to earn my living with a bad update. Boot from recovery disk, uninstall Rapport, revert to previous known good configuration, and the problem goes away. Let Rapport back on, computer immediately fails to boot again.

I told the bank in question that the software they asked me to install wasn't working, and now every time I log in to their business banking site, and I decline to use Rapport selecting the option that says it didn't work for me, they tell me that Rapport has been tested by them. So not only do they want me to install malware, but my bank is also incompetent at security. Great, now I'm really thrilled to be trusting them with my company's money!

In that situation, I don't necessarily care about their new product. I want to pay my X per year maintenance fee for the existing product I already have, and in return to get security and compatibility updates for as long as I need them.

If at any time what I get isn't worth the money, I have the option to stop paying and be no worse off than I was before. This is the crucial distinction between what I'd consider signing up for and a full subscription model that, for me, would be an obvious deal-breaker. One stops developing if I stop paying; the other stops working entirely.

If at any time Microsoft produce a new product that I want, I can buy that just as I would today, and in due course I'd then pay them to maintain that product properly instead of my old one.

In this case, the crucial distinction is choice. If I have Windows XP, I can choose to continue with it and receive proper maintenance updates even though Vista is out, and Microsoft get revenues to support that from my maintenance fees. If Windows 7 arrives, I can buy the upgrade from XP to 7, cancel the maintenance on XP, and then when my included-with-purchase maintenance runs out on 7 I just start paying the maintenance fees for that to keep my going while we all ignore Windows 8 and Microsoft try to make something I want more than what I already have.

Just to be clear, I was talking about graphics professionals there: people who design things like user interface themes and web graphics as their primary role have told me they prefer some of these newer tools to working with Photoshop for the same jobs. Photoshop simply wasn't designed for that kind of precision work, and its UI is far from ideal in that context. In several cases, Fireworks was cited as a better alternative, but we know how that story ended.

For digital artists, meaning people who really are essentially painting with a computer, sure, the tools I'm talking about aren't the best choice. It's not their niche. Likewise presumably for people who really are professional photographers or in a related role and so who really do need to touch up photography to production standards. It would be fascinating to see what kind of people are really using Creative Suite/Cloud applications and for what kinds of job, but I don't see how even Adobe can have more than sample/survey level data on that, and if they do I imagine they keep it very close to their chest.

Maybe, but extended support for Windows 7 will be available until at least 2020. Microsoft's publicly stated policy is:

People might constantly update. Whether those updates are upgrades is a very different question. I've had plenty of so-called upgrades in recent years that left me obviously worse off than I was before.

This has nothing to do with Agile software development. This is about cheap, nasty, rushed software development by organisations who can't or simply won't build software that lasts for use by people with real work to do. If Microsoft really does surrender to the same cheap junk philosophy in order to stay competitive in a market where people don't mind paying for cheap junk, we will all regret it in a few years.

Personally, I'd rather have an OS that can actually run the software I bought for more than five minutes. Fortunately, it seems that whatever the rhetoric being thrown around in this discussion, Microsoft have given clear public statements that are closer to my view on this one, so it would now be very difficult for them to renege on that with any OS they have shipped so far without risking significant legal trouble.

I think the software market is more complicated than that today. For example, a lot of people have been using Photoshop and Illustrator (and Fireworks) in recent years to design graphics for web sites and user interfaces: icons, logos, background images, that kind of thing. However, there are several applications available right now on OS X that are not only much cheaper than Creative Cloud but also get much more positive comments from professionals who are doing that kind of work.

Basically, we've all been trying to force Adobe's 800lb gorillas to do the job for years, but the reality is that we were just waiting for someone to come along with a tool aimed at exactly what we need to do, with a feature set and user interface tailor made for that kind of work. Now several different businesses have, and if the people in the industry I know are at all representative, those newcomers are already attracting a significant share of the professional market. Not only are they cheaper by far than Photoshop, they are also significantly better in that particular niche.

This is why I suspect it's a matter of time before Adobe's behemoths start to suffer a serious exodus. Rather like Microsoft with Office, they are trying to be all things to all people, but that creates huge application suites that are inevitably full of compromises and expensive to maintain. It's not LibreOffice that Microsoft should fear, it's tools like Scrivener stealing all the professional authors, some modern replacement for TeX stealing all the technical people, on-line collaborative editors Google Docs stealing all the casual business users, and so on. It's death by a thousand cuts.

The thing is, getting back to where we came in, the requirements for an operating system are quite different. If you're writing the foundation that all of these other applications are going to run on, then stability and longevity are vital attributes. So while I think Adobe's move to a subscription model will probably be successful in the short term but in the longer term it will prompt more effective competition than they've faced in ages, I think Microsoft have a natural ally in offering long-term support at a price because there are always going to be updates people want for compatibility with new hardware and software without sacrificing compatibility with what they already use.

I couldn't agree more, and I think your comment about defects that shouldn't ever have been there is the big concern with my preferred version. Then again, shipping junk with the excuse that you'll fix it later with an on-line update (or not) is regrettably how significant parts of the software industry seem to work already. I'm not sure we'd really be any worse off in that respect provided that, as I mentioned, a reasonable initial period of support is included free and expected as part of the original purchase.

However, later on, supporting things like new hardware or evolving networking standards, while maintaining the foundation I trust and backward compatibility with all my existing devices and software, isn't something I think can reasonably be demanded for free. This isn't something that should have been included on initial delivery, because the changing environment hadn't changed yet.

Sorry, I don't buy it. They might love to be Apple or Google and force their customer base to upgrade instead of providing long-term support, but that's not who they are, and the market most likely to pay them real money for their new OS isn't going to accept a compulsory 2-3 year upgrade cycle on every PC they run.