I do consulting for several lawyer firms, from 1 person to assisting 40 person firms. They do have specialiazed software programs that are $$$$$. Not to mention the online access to case history and trials is a yearly subscription. Say what you want about lawyers themselves, but the firms do have a lot of backend costs. Same as most industries really.

weird how an 8 year old software product doesn't support other newer browsers properly eh? :P

The registry used to be a complete festering pile of trash. However you may have noticed those websites refer to PREVIOUS versions of windows, several years out of date. Software changes. Get off your high horse, accept that maybe things have changed. 'You can still think windows sucks if you want, but atleast have current information. I mean, i could rip on all the annoying things about my apple ][e did back in the day and that would be as current as your info.

Microsoft R&D Division is simply fascinating. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research#Research_projects for a list of some of them, but they have a lot more directly applied items as well. Most of it never sees the light of day in microsoft's products, but they do innovate internally/academically.

Enterprise Linux versions cost money too. Chances are if you're not an experienced sysadmin for any OS, reading through forums and googling vs having paid support will be a necessity.

But really, i'm pretty sure the production value of the shows have gone up to, allowing more realistic/special effects. I love the original Star Trek, but even I have to admit the special effects budget could have been bigger. The reason I mention that - more commercial time pays for the show. You as an individual directly pay what maybe $1/yr towards any show via cable subscription. If you want talented actors, great sets, good quality tv shows, someone has to pay. Each episode of a popular series costs anywhere from half a million to 5million i believe. commercials suck, but what's the alternative?

What does work? If you want to complain and point out why you're right..... can you contribute some working ideas on how to make things better?

i myself am well versed with wsus/autopatcher/RIS/nlite/driverpack programs... but for me, one of the biggest issues is all the OTHER software that needs to be reinstalled. True, a lot of pcs have standard windows/office/ninite stuff, but there are piles of "one off" programs that need to be reinstalled. Most of those apps unfortunately cannot be done via msi/GP stuff. This also brings us to another issue - reconfiguring on a domain. A standalone PC or a huge corporate where all the machines are the same are easy. It's the smaller companies (under 100 or 50 pcs surely) which all are different. Getting the PC to new install state is easy, but reproducing the same effect is annoying.

er, intune is not renting microsoft office. In fact, it has NOTHING to do with microsoft office.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsintune/what-is-windows-intune.aspx - lists what it is.

Intune is basic workstation maintainance really. It's not for home users, it's not for getting rid of Microsoft Office, it's for reducing the need of a helpdesk monkey to do patches and updates etc on machines... more importantly for the road warriors of the companies.