That is true, but gold/silver is more concrete. There is a psychological factor in concrete things.

So here we had a few admins and a bunch of 'normal' users. The normal users needed an admin to create a new group to facilitate sharing. With seafile, the users could create their own groups. That and frankly we hit a few bugs with sync and seafile seemed to do better.

owncloud's document preview and the plugins were a bit worse than seafile's baked in, but primarily it's just a platform for replicating and sharing file content for us, we don't really care about anything beyond that. We don't use the commercial seafile.

Except Lotus Notes is still around, but yes, it's like MS took a look at Lotus Notes and said 'now *this* is the way to do things'.

This is the example of precisely how disciplined the 'appliances' you get from vendors are constructed.

This is a *security* focused appliance that made this goof from one of the more well regarded vendors in the market.

Think about that next time you save a few seconds of your time buying an appliance or even pulling down something from dockerhub instead of just installing the platform.

Of course the software industry has gone to town with appliances, meaning they spend no time properly packaging things anymore because an 'appliance' will take care of all of it.

Sharepoint needs absolutely zero help to look silly.

Of MS world of products, sharepoint is perhaps the worst festering thing they got.

Depending on your usage, I'd recommend http://seafile.com/en/download...

We were using owncloud, but at least at last check a non-admin user needed a lot of things done by an admin on their behalf, and seafile let's people make their own groups and such.

One: Superfish was not exactly a Lenovo invention, it was crap shovelware that was gimped by their use of highly insecure Komodia (which also got their insecure interception into other products, just Superfish via Lenovo was the most notorious vector). All the PC/laptop vendors were basically playing russian roulette with crapware to get costs down and Lenovo lost. The somewhat silver lining is that it was a wake up call to the industry that crapware comes with a very real and very high risk.

Two: Superfish was part of the general cost cutting measures for cheap laptops that they thankfully spare the Thinkpad series from. Even 'ThinkVantage' design has been decreased over time as Microsoft beefed up in-box capabilities.

Three: I agree it's rare for me to want to have a premade desktop and make my own (mainly because some of the components I like are generally tied to needlessly high end other poarts), but there's not realistic options in the portable space.

Note that Lenovo gets blame, and Superfish gets blame, but let us not forget that the critical flaw originated with Komodia, which managed to get their mistake into more than just Superfish. People who didn't even have superfish were exposed to the exact same problem.

They do that. My broadwell X1 Carbon has nicely backlit keyboard (though I never use it).

Well there's certainly a prominent example of a company taking explicit aim to *break* knock-off devices in a driver update:
http://arstechnica.com/informa...

It's not about working through BIOS/burned in rom. It's about when manufacturers go to some cheap knock-off that closely enough matches some other component in the market close enough to get the wrong drivers.

Alternatively, when they use a configuration of some component in a way that requires special drivers (e.g. cramming a part into a thermal situation that's undersized for the component and having particular throttling scenarios to preserve capability and/or comfort).

Adobe is an application. Windows is an OS platform. For Office I could see the argument, but for the OS being a subscription... That would be the opposite direction of all their competitors.

There are no signs and no precedent in the industry for a move like that. My point was that they are doing their best to dress up business as usual in clever ways to make various people *feel* like they are changing in a direction they think is right (revenue that resembles a subscription for investors, upgrades for OEM devices to new platforms without ever 'paying' for the OS explicitly for the end user). It seems silly they have to do it, but it's what they need to do to shape perception as the market is fickle and demands change even out of businesses that demonstrate solid revenue. This is probably the best sort of strategy from a business perspective I could see them moving with.

With regards the last release of Windows, everything I've heard is basically them deciding it is 'rolling release' time, with the LTS branch sort of still getting releases, but without so much noise each release.

Perhaps you should read the full thing ". Nothing however really changed in any real fundamental way."

They use phrasing that sounds like a subscription model and accounting trickery to make it *behave* like a subscription model, but the actual business does not change as they still just sell a license in a transactional way with respect to the client device. Essentially, they are hand waving to investors demanding annuity income to say 'think of a purchase as a prepaid subscription that expires when they probably are going to get a new license anyway'.

MS is stuck with the knowledge that a *real* subscription model for an *OS* would be suicide, but facing investors who think it would be awesome, so this is what they came up with.

They keep using 'Windows as a service' and 'supported lifetime of the device' which strongly hint at subscription.

On the financial side, they have done something with a strong hint about what they means: they declared they will defer a license revenue purchase and only count a part of it a year until the projected useful life of the hardware device is over. So they need to come out and be explicit, but it seems nothing really changes from the customer side and they play accounting tricks to transform their revenue to resemble a subscription offering.

So all signs currently point to Windows 10 being more of the same. Their upfront price is large enough and in pracitce gets thrown out with the hardware it was running on.

So they gussied up some fancy accounting and marketing and suddenly they look like they are a 'free' platform to customers and subscription to investors. Nothing however really changed in any real fundamental way.