Install Office 2016 OEM without Live account

I am in exactly the same boat. This impacts 90% of my clients.

To make matters worse, Microsoft seems to think everyone has gigabits of bandwidth lying around waiting to be used. The loss of SBS is now giving me huge headaches as older SBS2008 machines reach their end of life. I have a number of clients, businesses of 8-12 people in remote areas with diabolical internet, <3mbps down, <400kbps up yet they are expected to move their email to the cloud? At least SBS meant email trickled in and out in the background, it was slow but workable. There is no way I can expect these clients to suffer through miserable email speed as well as a 1GB download per PC to install office as well as the Microsoft ID issue, nor are they willing to stump up the considerable costs in licencing to run full blown Exchange internally.

I am also wondering how MS thinks small businesses operate? There is usually regular staff turnover so MS ID's per user are not viable. If we move those with decent internet links to Office 365 then the licences can be transferred to other users but as mentioned above, this is not always possible. There is also no way they will be prepared to spend three times the cost per seat for volume licencing.

I have been creating a generic Microsoft ID (literally microsoftid@clientdomain) as an alias on an existing account (usually the admin account that I have access to, a generic birthdate and the business owners mobile number ) to activate Office Home and Business so I can download and install on my 70mbps connection. I have not yet had any issues but also have not connected more than 5-6 activations to any one account. When that happens, it will require microsoftid2@clientdomain etc. A few things concern me though, also my clients, such the privacy and security off all these PC's making direct connections to MS cloud services under the one account. Users are being told to only save data to internal file servers but there does appear to be some two way history that sometimes comes through to another machine such as recent files.

For non-business users, I simply hand them a licence key card and tell them that unfortunately for reasons outside my control, I cannot install this for them unless they trust me with their MS ID login, they will need to do it themselves and if they dont have a Microsoft ID, they will need to create one or move to the free Libre Office if it has enough functionality for what they need.

For what it is worth, when I took Sushma's original suggestion and posted to the Office 365 forum here: https://community.office365.com/en-us/f/156/t/412487, it began another thread just like this one--accompanied by a MS support response that dodged the question by pointing to which products require which types (personal/corporate) MS accounts. Not a word of which products, if any, might allow activation by product key only.

For sure, buying retail (if even that can be activated w/o an account in 2016 versions as it was in 2013) will be cheaper than OEM, at least from my time-lost perspective (i.e. considering all the extra wasted time I spend trying to figure out and babysit the OEM licensing process now). Of course, I cannot charge my clients for my headaches or extra time involved, but I will charge them the extra for retail. The loss of time for me is just too significant for me to risk repeating this beating-head-against-wall over OEM licensing!

In last night's debacle, I finally just gave up on OEM 2016, bought a retail copy of 2013 H & B online from a retailer that still carries it, and this activated w/o a MS account. I guess I will just keep the 2016 for when I get a new computer and can put it on my own MS account. But that is not something I can repeat regularly.

Just to make your opinion of the system even better, it is not just OEM, you cant activate Office 2016 Retail without an MS live ID either. You could with 2013 but you cannot even buy Office 2016 with installation media , it is just a product key card and you cannot even download it, let alone activate it without a Live ID. At least not here in Australia.

Buy up 2013 H&B while there is still time.

OEM keys that come with Dell laptops are asking for Microsoft Accounts to be created.

I refuse to do this, if I order 200 new computers I am not making 200 MS accounts, nor am I going to pile them all into one account because we'd never know which key went to which machine.

I was on the phone with Office subscriptions, Presales and Licensing, Professional Support, the Product Activation Department, a Partner technical router, and then someone else who took my name/number and then dropped the call and didn't call me back.

One of the teams told me that these keycodes in the box are flagged as RETAIL and not OEM. 

But regardless, this is a huge problem.   I can't activate these machines on a one-by-one basis, no sane IT department would undertake the task of creating discrete Live accounts for each and every new machine they get.

Plus the whole point of licensing @ the machine purchase is to cover the DEVICE not a PERSON.  That's what OEM licensing is supposed to be.

Very glad I opened this thread, now. I thought maybe I was missing some simple workaround or was the only one bothered by all of this nonsense. As one user posted, it seems that the same applies to the retail license the same as OEM. So even if using a corporate MS account to activate these office licenses en masse, what happens when you sell a batch of old computers three years from now, along with the Windows & legitimate Office license, as part of a rotating replacement plan? How does the new user, wanting to clean up the computer, after wiping & reinstalling Windows, then reinstall Office on the same computer without your corporate activation account? Sure, I'm going to give my corporate MS account information to Uri's Used Computer sales so they can use the license they legitimately purchased with the used computer.

It is obvious this is obnoxious behavior from Microsoft. Not sure if they are mean, or just stupid. But the big question is whether we can get Microsoft to reconsider this obnoxious behavior? Their tech support has no say over how things are done. Is there anybody at Microsoft that actually cares what the customer thinks? Have they finally just said, "Well, we have them now. Time to force everyone to drink the green Kool-Aid to prove their loyalty?"

Maybe MS will get the picture if Dell's (and HP, etc, etc) business sales start falling off. For sure, I will not be buying Office 2016 on any new computers from Dell. I would rather purchase 2013 retail as long as I can still find it. At least,  with that, I already have the downloaded installation media and know I can still activate it purely with the product key.

And it is not even a question of price. I have always said, "If you want to use a Microsoft product, you have to pay the price." But all of this account-based activation puts it over the top for me, and I can just save a bundle of money by switching to a free product. I am seriously considering "Goodbye Microsoft, hello, LibreOffice..."