Re:The Rise and Fall of the 'IBM Way'
by akaahduofjdr on Friday December 15, 2023 @11:45PM
(#38661812)
This is a good summary of a cultural change to the industry that I have a very hard time describing to young people and those just getting started.
The pre-internet / big web tech days were vastly different. Tell a student today that you and everyone you were working around at the time got the chance to work at a computer company. Most don't even have a framework that would allow them to conceptualize what a computer company that isn't Apple and doesn't sell phones or throwaway junk at Best buy actually does. And especially they can't understand what it's like when there isn't a single, incredibly low margin, cheap, and slave labor supported supply chain ready to ship you parts at a moments notice, and those parts will be for a hardware architecture and small number of very similar operating systems that happen to also account for 90%+ of all the serious computing capacity supporting the world economy.
The fact that all the computer companies died and/or were outsourced, and the technologies were all turned into commodities, is something we don't really talk about all that much.
The pre-internet / big web tech days were vastly different. Tell a student today that you and everyone you were working around at the time got the chance to work at a computer company. Most don't even have a framework that would allow them to conceptualize what a computer company that isn't Apple and doesn't sell phones or throwaway junk at Best buy actually does. And especially they can't understand what it's like when there isn't a single, incredibly low margin, cheap, and slave labor supported supply chain ready to ship you parts at a moments notice, and those parts will be for a hardware architecture and small number of very similar operating systems that happen to also account for 90%+ of all the serious computing capacity supporting the world economy.
The fact that all the computer companies died and/or were outsourced, and the technologies were all turned into commodities, is something we don't really talk about all that much.