That sounds a lot like your company allowed either a personal account or an account tied to an individual to be used to purchase the software. Surely a better policy would be to use an account not tied to an individual in that case?
This is universally a bad design. It's not just Apple. I know, for example, Microsoft closed a loophole with Microsoft accounts being allowed to be opened using a company email address when your organisation has a hosted domain. This is stupid. Every year I now need to purchase my MSDN subscription using a personal email address based account because my corporate account is not allowed to buy anything from the Microsoft Store. To add insult to injury - unless I am very, very careful and make sure the personal account is completely logged out, I then can't apply the activation code correctly to my corporate account that is associated with the subscription renewal. Before this renewal, which was successful, I have had two years in a row where I have ended up needing to file a support ticket and wait for the "magic" activation flag to be re-set because my browser was half logged in. This year I just logged in to my personal account with Edge and use Chrome for my corporate one to register the activation for the renewal. It shouldn't be this hard!!!
Also - yes, this should probably all be done by IT for me in the background, but we are a small company and that is just the way it is. The subscription was set up years ago and I inherited it from another developer when they left about 3 years ago.
> That sounds a lot like your company allowed either a personal account or an account tied to an individual to be used to purchase the software. Surely a better policy would be to use an account not tied to an individual in that case?
It wasn't even obvious that the personal account existed in the first place; if the app store "just works" and the former designated Macintosh user doesn't care about software updates too much, forgetting that the account was necessary and it should have been either handed over to posterity or purged by uninstalling the involved apps is a reasonable outcome.
The way Apple handles this sucks. It is not clear how you can transfer purchases, or if that is even possible. It would be nice if there was an easy way to merge obsolete/outdated accounts in to a valid one.
> It is not clear how you can transfer purchases, or if that is even possible.
I agree, but there are at least a few clear reasons I can imagine why Apple don’t want this:
1. They don’t want people to resell software that they bought.
2. If you could transfer licenses, a group of many people could share a single license between them, transferring it back and forth. Instead of all of them buying one license each.
3. If licenses could be transferred there would for sure be cases of scammers tricking people to transfer their licenses for paid software to them.
I used to think so, but it gets difficult with DRMed digital downloads.
For example, I owned a piece of hardware called Akai MPC X. It came with a companion software for the computer, a DAW called “MPC2 Software”.
When I sold the hardware Akai MPC X to someone else, I wanted to transfer the companion software for the computer to them. Akai demanded a ridiculous €100 fee to transfer the license for the software from my user to their user. I had other software on my user as well, so me handing over the user as whole was not an option and therefore only Akai could have helped us transfer the license.
In the end the buyer of the hardware therefore got only the hardware and not the companion software for computer.
That experience soured my opinion of Akai by a lot.
The MPC X is still nice hardware and I kind of want to buy an MPC X again in the future. But it sucks that Akai is like this with the software license.
Microsoft has the tools to manage these subscriptions in a business, they work pretty smoothly even for a small org. There's no reason for you to continue to do that other than just inertia of the way you've done it in the past.
Microsoft makes the tools you want available, you're just not using it and acting like it's Microsoft's fault.
I don't get mad at the knife maker when I cut myself cooking.
Probably, but my org leans very heavily on outsourced IT, and so we are at the mercy of whatever their policy is. Also - if I let the said outside IT take over management - it will go wrong. The current system just means I need to go find a director and ask them for a company credit card - it really isn't any more complicated than that. The big drama is that I never created a personal work account, so I only have my AD one, and I am not allowed by MS to create an account associated with that identity now. If I go to renew, I guess as we have always done it via retail, that is the only option. The pain I went through to transfer this account to my identity after the original owner left the company, I am not really likely to mess with it again if I only have to do this dance once a year.
This is universally a bad design. It's not just Apple. I know, for example, Microsoft closed a loophole with Microsoft accounts being allowed to be opened using a company email address when your organisation has a hosted domain. This is stupid. Every year I now need to purchase my MSDN subscription using a personal email address based account because my corporate account is not allowed to buy anything from the Microsoft Store. To add insult to injury - unless I am very, very careful and make sure the personal account is completely logged out, I then can't apply the activation code correctly to my corporate account that is associated with the subscription renewal. Before this renewal, which was successful, I have had two years in a row where I have ended up needing to file a support ticket and wait for the "magic" activation flag to be re-set because my browser was half logged in. This year I just logged in to my personal account with Edge and use Chrome for my corporate one to register the activation for the renewal. It shouldn't be this hard!!!
Also - yes, this should probably all be done by IT for me in the background, but we are a small company and that is just the way it is. The subscription was set up years ago and I inherited it from another developer when they left about 3 years ago.