Theft of Intellect, IBM Style.
return >
by "Name Withheld"
If you'd ever dealt with IBM Corporation, you'd probably often wondered at how so much technology could end up being concentrated at one company, where so seemingly few individuals of substantial genius exist that could think it all up. Instead, what you see is an aggregation of ideas and people... many of whom will work for the company for relatively little money doing the labor as either employees or contractors, and others who appear to be more aggressive and intimidating who appear to work for an internal, paramilitary IBM that has little to do with computing.
You see bean counters who count bean counters, and money experts to are better at moving money around than the Mob will ever be. You see an enterprise who could conceive of a Microsoft as a means to market technology with software without giving up it's nature to the public or it's source code to competitors in a field it monopolizes. You see a company who has back-office computing in literally every government and every major business in the free and non-free world and knows how to pull the "Golden Chain" - a rule that suggests that if they might present a technological advantage to a Government, that they had better be given special privileges or they just might go and give that edge to your competition Government. And you see a company that has created the notion of "trading areas" where it delves not only into the provision of computing, but into the other daily business of it's clients ranging from the computer dealers to the government agencies to the Fortune companies to the small businesses. Would you believe it's all just a projection of a business strategy that has defined how IBM made itself the biggest computer business in the world?
For an interesting study of where IBM learned how to be what it is, the ultimate expression of a Trust and the ultimate purveyor of labor racketeering, you need to look into it's history.
Founded in the 19th Century by brilliant German immigrant Herman Hollerinth, IBM originally was known as Hollerinth Corporation, invented by a German man who utilized punch tabulation cards (manually punched originally, then punched by machinery that could also read them later in his technological evaluation) that could keep records of persons, places and things in decks of such cards that could be stored compactly, read and sorted, and so forth. Such record keeping was perfect for Accounting for People and Voting (as in those Chad laden voting systems in Florida), and Hollerinth's original claim to fame, one which would take on a far more sinister, Big Brotherish Satannic look during World War II, as the company provided record keeping to Nazi German Death Camps, originally found it's market to be the United States Government Census bureau. (Go to http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com to find information about a book about IBM's willingness to be involved in suppression of a people and genocide, to learn more about how it learned to use Gestapo Tactics and Legal Strategies hand in hand, that may have come in handy to defeat the US Anti-Trust Laws... and Labor Racketeering Acts.)
But over time, the seasonal nature of this usage by the Government, led IBM to look for other things to do, and that took money, so the Hollerinth family and their patents hired the Rockefeller Family's Banker Middleman, J.P. Morgan and his senior echelon leader, John C. Flint, to try and define additional, less seasonal markets to use Hollerinth equipment for. Originating in the Binghamton / Utica area of scenic Finger Lakes New York State, under Morgan rule, new headquarters were found and a new "suited" look found for the employees. Flint, attracted to various "supply dynamics", the customers who might use such things, merged Hollerinth with a Scale Company and a Clock Company, creating in essence, the notions of measurement of time and volume, the next great means for which to use Hollerinth's inventions, namely to keep weight of goods sold by the pound (such as precious metals) and to keep track of the people who processed them (the labor, who management needed clocks to keep tabs on in order to judge them for their salary payrolls.) The natural extension of human record keeping, and business measurement, along with labor time cards, was the Automated Accounting field, which could use all these records just for the purposes of managing and defining the labor and material aspects of their businesses, and could use the reporting printers developed by the new company, Computation, Tabulation and Recording, to print labor and management reports and even salary payroll checks. And from there Flint and his CTR management spread their tendrals outwordly into every single business there was, "all they had was time to take, and all the had was money to make", said Flint.
Over time, as IBM developed new mechanisms as CTR, including typewriters and automatic clocks that kept time of business processes directly recorded into punched card systems for analysis and management control, the refined and square edged nature of the punched card, began to demonstrate it's proficiency at greatly exceeding manual accounting methods on a scale of 100:1 in terms of depth of record keeping and in terms of breadth of manpower control, allowing companies using CTR (later renamed International Business Machines, or IBM for short) equipment to grow bigger with less management and accounting and human resources department manpower, allowing lower overhead, and higher productivity out of a corporate structure, than those companies that did not. Flint's reinvention of Hollerinth to CTR to IBM, and hiring of an expert, nearly obsessed Sales Force under the auspices of Thomas J. Watson, literally the Devil himself, from National Cash Register, had defined the answer and a clear lesson that IBM soon learned: computation (even back then in the form of advanced punch card machines, sorters, addressers, printers, and etc.) represented an edge that gave one company the ability to grow, while it's competitors were unable to, and IBM used that ability throughout it's life not only to absorb or repress business competition, but to lure other businesses and governments into buying it's technology. Lesson Number One: He who most efficiently controls information, has the greatest ability to profit from it, and he who does, also has the ability to control his business's expenses better, and gain a biting technological edge over his or her competition. This lesson is one IBM not only has used it's entire existence, but which it has used to lure it's customers into situations where IBM can literally express a degree of control over THEIR existence. It is something that would become one of the key "secret formulae" that IBM would use to eventually grow from the Most Power Corporation in America (during the 40's and WWII) to the Most Powerful Corporation on Earth (in the year 2001.)
During it's growth, IBM also learned that crushing and destroying competition was mandatory, were it to monopolize a market segment with it's overwhelming sales dominance in any area. And from Thomas J. Watson, the Devil himself, came the skills IBM would use forever: move into any area, duplicate the opposition, undercut his prices, hire his people away from him, spread false rumors about them, bash their reputation, destroy their existing relationships and repress any competitive element who might give the competition an upper hand, particularly technological talent that might represent a threat. This last area would become so lucrative for IBM, as it discovered it could not only repress the talent, but steal it's dreams, ideas and inventions, that by 1960, IBM deployed nearly as big a law department as the United States Attorney General, transfixed upon taking any idea it could find, fitting it to it's product line if possible, patenting it for the sake of controlling it, and then going on to deploy it in any way profitable. By the 1970's, IBM had also developed a vast World Trade Area management that was literally in the business of outfitting cash cow businesses to appear independent, while actually representing the trade from an individual IBM area. Companies that IBM and the Morgan/Rockefeller interests acquired in Nazi Germany, Italy, Reconstructionist France, elsewhere in Europe and in Japan, as investments, became key means for IBM to "shuffle the dominoes around" and hide much of it's income from US Taxation. And entire governments, and even criminal organizations came to know IBM as the "Technological Subway System" - a kind of pack mule railroad running globally, where one could as easily export goods and services through as one could import stolen motor vehicles, if one had the right kinds of contacts within what became known as The IBM Underground, a sort of informal organized crime system maintained by IBM World Trade to complimentarily endorse and support special privileges for key clients.
In effect by 1990, IBM had become practically a Government all unto itself, globally, with 330,000 employees and 100 Billion a year in revenues domestically. It had learned how to repress technological competition, manipulate riches, governments and it's client base to it's own advantage, and had established an enormous dependency upon it by it's sister businesses in the Morgan fold such as Chase, Rockefeller Group, Citibank, AT&T and GE.
And it had developed a practice of incriminating or opposing any technological contributor whom it felt it could enslave, ranging from programmers to developers to systems engineers to sales reps, you name it... a practice which one may call here - Techno Slavery, procedures from which included filing false complaints with police forces and engaging in public reputation burning strategies, also included fundamental manipulation of family circumstances, and alleged creation of actual tragic circumstances for the lives of those workers who tried and oppose IBM's will. One example, an IBM district sales manager, made the almighty error of leaving IBM and going to Wang Laboratories, a semi-competing company (no computer business actually competes with IBM, by the way, but that is for further elaboration.) After going there, he attracted the competitive ire of a leading Wang district manager, who spread rumors back to IBM that the former IBM'er had stolen key IBM customer situations for Wang, an allegation that was simply not true, but perpetrated by the Wang DM to try and shake the former IBM'ers confidence, knowing that that was worse than being accused of robbing Fort Knox.
Shortly thereafter, and this took place in the late 70's and early 80's, mysterious events took place in the life of the former IBM'er working for Wang, culminating in a hit and run accident that turned his young son into a vegetable, on the street, a crime that was never solved. And the executive at CBS Corporation who had been originally accused of speaking badly of IBM AND being wooed to Wang as a new customer was around that time, found dead of a long distance bullet wound on a Golf Course in New York State. These related events only exemplify the kind of behavior pattern that has surrounded the vast monetary exercises that represent customer-ship with IBM Corporation. No one knows nor has ever been able to prove that IBM had any hand in these two events. It was, however, quite significant that these two events appeared, themselves to be inter-related and somehow involved an IBM employee who left IBM and a competing Wang employee who feared his competition for a higher level Wang employment position.
Nonetheless, IBM continued to grow steadily right past the infamous Anti-Trust suit of the 60's, from the 70's to the 80's to the 90's.
But all was not well at IBM in the 80's and early 90's. The mainstream company was faltering in the face of competition from Xerox, Digital Equipment and Data General in a race to build minicomputer servers and in the effort to be the first to commercialize the windowed desktop computer developed originally on a Wang system, by an ingenious programmer from New Jersey, for Citibank in the mid 1970's.
[MORE TO COME...]