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0 pointssmithoc7d ago0 comments

This is the first time I have seen refusing to pay bribes framed as a moral failing and character flaw.

Perhaps it's not that he "didn't understand he was supposed to bribe" but rather that he thought that system was bad and antiquated and that he was taking a principled stand for the modern (of the time) technology industry to move away from those historical norms.

It didn't work, but he's not bad for trying.

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dfe7d ago

Bribes are a feature of politically-controlled economies, not a bug.

Thirty years ago when this was all going down, I believed the narratives of the time. Greedy Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer pushing IBM's OS/2 out of the consumer market with aggressive DOS and Windows OEM deals.

I mean, they absolutely did do that, but I think the motivation was competitive survival.

The Steve Ballmer interview really shed a lot of light on this, particularly the portion about the IBM and Microsoft OS/2 divorce: https://youtu.be/CYC49_aeop0?t=1476

TalkingCodeMonk6d ago

I find it simultaneously amusing and depressing that you took my comment as a promotion of bribery, rather than a stark commentary on the sytemic corruption that has destroyed Americas democracy, and is destroying liberal democracies worldwide.

How the system has self-corrected to empower the most greedy and sociopathic of behaviours, across all private and public institutions, the entire time; so much so that the average person can't even comprehend the root causes, or any solution beyond a simple band-aid non-solution.

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