IBM, the once great US corporation up to the 80s that never laid off workers, has been downsizing ever since with mass layoffs in pockets of the country and now five thousand more by replacing them with workers overseas. This is all too emblematic of the corporate world since the 80s.
 IBM apparently has never recovered from shell-shock for giving the green light to Microsoft in the early ‘80s. It should have given the old CPM operating system [at the time far superior] the same license for true competition and ultimately a totally different scenario today. IBM also let cloning get out of hand, even to the extent that piracy PC manufacturers were intimidated by Microsoft to repudiate OS/2. Today, therefore, what else could one expect from Big Blue unable to stand up to its principles?

 Apple, too, is to blame for its arrogance in keeping its system proprietary and obstinately pricing itself out of the market while allowing MS to steal it blind — not to mention the wholesale theft of intellectual properties, such as WordPerfect and Netscape. As a consequence Gates was the only kid on the block and didn’t really care about the consumer or he would not have been able to sell products that were bug-ridden so it could rush to mass-market for the satisfaction of the cloning industry hungry for an operating system and willing to give up integrity.

 As for Linux — other than for the internet — they are barely out of the primitive DOS box for the average Joe or Jill and will take another five years just to be modestly competitive, while OS/2 and Warp have been dead for sometime — and another corpse, Amiga.
 The quasi breaking up Microsoft was only punitive to the extent of Gates’ ego. It hasn’t changed anything. Yet to Microsoft’s credit it remains in Seattle and clearly intends, though addleheaded, to continue to improve its products.