One of my first jobs was for a k12 district of 4 schools. I was the sole sysadmin for around 1600 users and had to justify any spend to the school board and the

One of my first jobs was for a k12 district of 4 schools. I was the sole sysadmin for around 1600 users and had to justify any spend to the school board and the PTO, so my decisions were usually based on 1) can I fit this into my very limited time and 2) can I get a grant or significant EDU discount for this. Usually only commercial stuff targeting EDU (like Microsoft at the time) was what I could get. It's no wonder Google has taken over. Single pane of glass for everything, almost fully automated, much more bulletproof than anything else available. I would have killed for that 15 years ago. Of course, at that time everything was in 'computer labs' and things werent really that bad since the machines were always available on wired connections. Doing a 1:1 deployment to that many people as a soloist with crappy mid-aughts wifi and windows XP would have been a completely different ballgame.