It's not back a fourth as much as you think I've stated some hard black and white rule, without exceptions. I think it's generally true. In this case, is the exception DEC or Jim Keller? Would he agree? I don't know. Some large orgs run like a collection of startups, internally.

But, I don't think DEC, a company working through the beginning of computer through peak dot com era, where every aspect was doubling or completely changing every year, is a context where holding onto ideas formed in an old context was viable or possible. You would, necessarily, have to temporarily suspend your trust in the institutional knowledge, with every new problem, since the whole compute world that the institutional knowledge was built on would have shifted under you.