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Comment by cbd1984 | Hacker News Reader

cbd1984·

For all the Old People, replace Microsoft with IBM above and transpose this back into the 1990s.

IBM went from EBCDIC and Micro Channel Architecture and SNA to "Well, they'll never actually beat Compaq and Dell in the primary growth market, but they still own the tippy-top of the Enterprise world. That's something."

Oh, and about this time, IBM shifted focus from AIX to getting behind Linux in a big way. Remember the TV commercials?

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37, started using Linux in '98 (what can I say, late bloomer), but ran OS/2 before that as "rebelling against the M$ hegemony" (plus OS/2 was technically superior). I still have some of the IBM Linux ads.

I still don't trust Microsoft and even if I did, I consider most of their offerings piss-poor and only "industry standard" because the "industry" is run by upper management idiots. (note that the "industry" I refer here to is most definitely not SV or startups; think old, entrenched organizations that have no impetus to change or improve. You know, like government orgs. Or Microsoft).

40, started using Linux in '93 or '94. You're probably old enough to realize that even though you're kind of in the same casino, those "upper management idiots" are playing a vastly different game than you or your startup. What portion of your work, for example, is spent figuring out whether the EU is going to give you a seven-figure fine for not localizing something, or whether a vendor from a non-NATO country can troubleshoot a server with a given client's PII on it, or whether the update you're pushing this week has been tested to make sure none of the 27 major products that take dependency on it are going to break? If your only metric is how much chrome the end user sees...

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