How Parallels' licensing scheme lost them a customer
The latest version of Parallels came out recently and I decided to upgrade to their latest one.I had the option to get their subscription that had some extra features for the same price as a perpetual license. I figure that the run rate lately for their software is about once a year and I know I upgrade I opted for the subscription version.I installed it on my laptop and went upstairs to install it on my desktop. I never use both at once (er, one set of eyes and hands) so I'm happy with how I'm licensing the software. I pay Parallels and they make software for me to use.Then I got a licensing error. Someone changed policies and now I can only install it on one machine.Call up support... ... ... (don't have the ticket number, if someone from Parallels want to look it up, it's in your system)It turns out that not only can you install it on one machine now. Not only that there's no way for you to transfer a license between computers without calling someone on the phone.I dove deeper to see if the non-subscription version had the same limitation and the gentleman on the phone confirmed this was the case.Oh, and their license transfer system is down anyway.Seriously?! Now even if I was willing to put up with the bullshit of calling someone every time I wanted to use a different machine, I wouldn't have been able to do it anyway.TL;DR: Parallels shot themselves in the foot. I guess I have to look for options for my virtualization needs. I hear VMWare has something like that.