IBM
Article
IBM is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 22, 2022 and December 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “When IBM got sick of antitrust fights”; “a sort of “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” type of standard”. It most often appears alongside 3D printing, Abercrombie & Fitch, Adam Neumann.
Metadata
- Category: Brands
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: September 22, 2022
- Last seen: December 04, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 3D printing (1 shared issues)
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- Abercrombie & Fitch (1 shared issues)
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- Adam Neumann (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- Aldo Rossi (1 shared issues)
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- Alessandro Menini (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Roesch (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- AMZ (1 shared issues)
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- Andy Beal (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
The last big antitrust case involved Microsoft. When IBM got sick of antitrust fights, they decided to outsource the operating system for their PCs. This was like throwing a monopoly bouquet at a wedding and Bill Gates was the bridesmaid who jumped highest and snatched the prize. His plan was to leverage this operating system monopoly into an internet monopoly, and the scheme was working before the Clinton administration sued. The reason I am writing this on Substack and not some Microsoft comment board is because of an antitrust lawsuit.
One clue is that not everywhere went modern at the same rate. The average suburban house is still built in traditional styles, because home-buyers have no need to justify them to anyone but themselves. But corporations and governments have a more complicated mandate. When executive or bureaucrats make decisions, they’re supposed to be catering to more than their personal aesthetic taste. They’re supposed to be following best practices and doing what’s responsible, maybe as judged by a sort of “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” type of standard. In architecture, the responsible-person standard was for big institutions that needed buildings to convene a Selection Committee including some representatives of the institution and at least one prestigious architect. But the representatives of the institution were out of their depth, and the prestigious architect could usually bully them into submission. So modernism it was.