It strikes me that slave labor-- or even just vastly underpaid labor-- cannot vote with either their wallet or feet. This is all just part of undoing Henry Ford's ONLY innovation (which had nothing to do with technology, BTW, he was the first to pay his line workers enough to even THINK of buying the products they were making, which jump-started the 20th Century in the USA, and leaked out to the rest of the world... until the last 20-30 years).
When you have a VP at IBM in a meeting ask "What are the four goals of IBM?", and, after the audience is giving each other blank stares, you hear the answer as "First quarter, second quarter, third quarter, fourth quarter" you start worrying. I wonder how many of the share-holders who saw the values rise ended up on unemployment whilst waiting to liquidate their shares. No one can serve two masters, and even a publicly traded corporation has to choose its loyalty carefully... and not being loyal to the customers will not do the share-holders a lot of good unless the dissolution (or outright liquidation) of the company qualifies as a "good". (shakes head) I *liked* working for IBM, then, but, by the time I was caught in the undertow of one of 2007's RIFtides, I didn't regret my departure as much as I would have two years before, but, then, the "High Performance Work-Place" was good at flushing out real team players and helped retain (IMHO) those excellent at handling paper. I still miss some things from my time at IBM, but, after 6 years away... I doubt it is anything like the IBM I knew. The Harborview Building at Rocky Point in Tampa went from 5 1/2 floors to, I've heard, less than half a floor (I guess the good news for RESO is that the big lease w/ Highwoods was fully adjusted by now, since the lease term ran out, IIRC, in 2011). (shrugs) It probably does not help that share-holders-- especially the institutional variety-- can force the mighty to the floor... BTW, I now work at a company where "IBM" is anathema which does bug me a bit. -soup -- John R. Campbell Speaker to Machines souperb at gmail dot com MacOS X proved it was easier to make Unix user-friendly than to fix Windows "It doesn't matter how well-crafted a system is to eliminate errors; Regardless of any and all checks and balances in place, all systems will fail because, somewhere, there is meat in the loop." - me ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
