[__rvx86]

I tried to convince the resident terrorists at my high school to get every student a .NET Passport and a Windows 8 netbook. (Yes, I went to a charter school where the administrators were Moslems)

Instead they went with the IBM-Legend (Red China) Chromebook, which is literally nothing more than a web browser with a thin Linux shrink-wrap (it’s almost invisible—you couldn’t even run native Linux apps from it!)

This despite the fact that you can cripple Windows NT for student use more effectively than you can do to a WEB BROWSER.

Within three weeks, students figured out how to unlock and disable the basic/shoddy security features that were added.

Total nightmare, considering that I had to deal with the problem to some extent—the IT tech was a terrorist who spoke little English; I speak little Turkish.

[__rvx86]

This was also back when Microsoft still gave away .NET Passport linkage to people with domain names—Windows Live Custom Domains, which meant that the basic infrastructure would have been free.

Contrast this to the Google Apps pricing structure—I think it ws $50 per user, per month.

Now it's $10/user-month, but it's still not cheap, considering that there were ~300 students at the time the school closed. The older schools would have had >500 high school students.