You’re telling me there’s more maintenance involved in maintiaing a Windows domain than to duplicate users and passwords on every machine in the workgroup? Is everyone logging in as Admin?
For those people, yeah.
Remember, no full-time IT staff, generally they are (or were) supported by Geek Squad (hahahaha...), and then there’s the per-seat licensing (remember, gotta have that or it doesn’t work).
From Joe Small Businessman’s point of view, which is easier? Getting a new computer with Dell and mapping a network drive or three and being ready to go instantly, or having to set up the computer, then having to set up AD for that computer, then discovering you can’t because SBS limits you to 5 users (or whatever the ludicrously small number is), having to call Microsoft, etc., etc.
Remember, he’s doing this without benefit of IT staff on hand, usually.
Yes. In most small companies I've seen, people have their own computers and don't use other peoples' machines. They will typically have only one account with Admin privileges if it's a small company, or one or two accounts for general users and an Admin account controlled by the IT shop if it's bigger or better run. It's only when you get to medium-sized to large businesses, say 50-100 machines, that you routinely find domain controllers and roaming user profiles.
Great numbers of machines have only one account with Admin privileges and automatic login.
-ccm
Perhaps they are using RFC compliant authentication methods like LDAP or Kerberos (not the MS-broken kind)