Why do you think they chose the mainframe vendor (presumably IBM if it is still around) in the first place?

IBM has very strict rules about anyone (below a certain but unspecified level!) offering or accepting anything at all. IBM employees you might meet are not allowed to so much as buy or accept lunch at a conference.

The general rule for US corruption is that it is concentrated at the top. Grift at lower levels amounts to stealing from your superiors; you should be getting hand-downs, not going freelance.

But US corruption has moved toward making it all legal at the top level; thus, "cost overruns" and "waste", all indictment-proof, because they are right there in the contract. So on any random tunnel, nuke, or weapons system, 10-25% is for the result and the rest goes discreetly into pockets. Top pockets. Ultimately, the latter motivates the project's organizational sponsors, and the project itself is just cover.

VC firms designate a few winners and lots of loser startups. The losers are then milked, "placing" executives who then spend on designated services. In the '90s these usually included Oracle licenses at $500k and up, a certain "e-commerce platform" (name forgotten), and recruiting agencies. It seems like there are a lot more outfits to siphon money than before.

(They fund losers because they are contractually obliged to place a certain amount of money in a fixed timeframe. When not enough winners show up, thd rest has to be placed on losers. Also, graft.)

> VC firms designate a few winner and lots of loser startups. The losers are then milked, "placing" executives who then spend on designated services.

This explains so much.

The new things must be cloud, auth, and HR platforms.

One reason solar and wind projects generally finish on time and budget, and why solar and wind costs keep dropping, may be that there are so many idealists involved. It might take decades to drive prices back up, even after the idealists are disposed of. In the meantime, those industries are not very lucrative for grifters, anyway until you get to SolarCity scale.

> IBM has very strict rules about anyone (below a certain but unspecified level!) offering or accepting anything at all. IBM employees you might meet are not allowed to so much as buy or accept lunch at a conference.

...in the US. In Poland IBM was caught bribing a government official a couple years ago.

Ah, but was it by anyone you might meet? Or someone above that certain level?

It was a local "sales director" (which in many companies is a title given to pretty much everyone doing enterprise sales).

Not everybody follows the rules. Not everybody who breaks them gets caught.

Reliability, predictability, compatibility...cost is not really important, and bribery is not a good idea in the Banking Industry.

>IBM

Or Fujitsu

This is effectively how 100% of medical deals got made.

Well i was talking about "traditional IT" hence the Mainframe thing (Finance etc.).