As President George W Bush tried to say: fool me once, fool on me. Fool me twice… err, well he didn’t remember the rest of that and I’m too hopping mad to do any better. The occasional bit of unhelpful behaviour from any software is to be expected, but when three separate companies all act the same way at the same time of year, one begins to run out of forbearance.
This column is about Software Behaving Badly, but I’m not thinking about irritating dialog boxes. It’s all in the billing system. In my case, Microsoft and TeamViewer both decided to renew my licences in the same month: both annual, both over £200, both with a whole bucketload of cheery emails telling me that this was an annual renewal, that it will happen again this time next year and, most importantly, I’d missed the boat to stop it from happening.
You might expect me to take a dim view of almost anything TeamViewer does, the phone scammer’s remote-control tool of
