Archive / Setup & friction
The Xerox Star sold a desktop metaphor few offices bought
Surviving Star 8010 documentation shows a realized desktop system that its own licensing kept locked to Xerox.
3 min readSetup & friction
Permission checks, maintenance and exit costs belong in the decision. Use a narrow access test, cost the recurring work and rehearse a replacement before depending on a vendor.
A minimum-rights test for a small team that checks both useful access and denied access across a shared knowledge base.
Compare a manual process and an automated alternative without relying on volatile plan prices.
Find out whether a team can leave a workflow vendor without losing data, behavior, access, or business continuity.
Read the original chapter with its caveats. Or use the work tools to make the next decision explicit.
Archive / Setup & friction
Surviving Star 8010 documentation shows a realized desktop system that its own licensing kept locked to Xerox.
3 min readArchive / Setup & friction
The OTA's 1985 study forecasts office automation's effects to 2000 while flagging its own forecasting tools as weak.
3 min readArchive / Setup & friction
Three Garante documents show what the regulator found, what it demanded, and what it confirmed OpenAI changed before Italian access resumed.
3 min readArchive / Setup & friction
Two public GitLab handbook pages, not the security team's gated one, show how Support and Engineering actually restrict AI use on company data.
3 min readArchive / Setup & friction
Windsurf's and Cognition's own blog posts document a leadership departure and an acquisition landing within days of each other in July 2025.
3 min readArchive / Setup & friction
A filed federal complaint and its docket show what is alleged against Otter.ai's meeting bot and that no court has yet ruled on it.
3 min read