South Africa has been the exception.

Well yes, it’s really difficult to switch when government only just managed to migrate to Windows 10 on most machines, and still uses Microsoft’s document formats for everything aside from PDF.

Up until a few years ago, UNISA was still using public-facing IIS servers and SARS was paying up the wazoo to maintain old Flash applets that people used to file their taxes.

One government department managed to waste R5 million on a WordPress website that used a $15 theme.

“He’s out of line, but he’s right.”

Microsoft’s implementation of the feature is called Windows Update Delivery Optimization.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-update-delivery-optimization-and-privacy-bf86a244-8f26-a3c7-a137-a43bfbe688e8

Here’s a short optimisation guide: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-delivery-optimization.html

Fundamentally it’s not like the Bittorrent protocol, even though there are similar behaviours and the result is the same. Microsoft retains the ability to stop the network from seeding updates and has ways of only targeting specific supported configurations to receive new updates.

Ah, Russian boot-licking.

This is the basis of the ASUS warranty issues recently when they had exploding AM5 motherboards and vague text about EXPO support voiding warranty, painting themselves into a corner when they only had unsupported firmware that would technically void warranty.

It doesn’t matter that the company says “Oh we won’t enforce that rule” but they still keep the rule in place.

macOS? You gotta be kidding. Windows and Office is huge.

Just the entrenchment of Sharepoint and Outlook alone is enough to make switching to anything else a difficult prospect.

That will see more increases over time, especially as Windows 10 EOL approaches.

Given the… frankly absurd rate at which people are signing up to servers, and subscribing to other servers, and posting and commenting and upvoting and…

I mean it’s getting a bit hairy, and user growth was already following a very steep growth curve. Reddifugees are hugging all instances to death.