Was it a HP Finance thing? Because there are a shit ton of people who can transact through them now. We had HP finance, and it became a game of sorts to see what crazy shit we could get with it. Theres a local mob who sell computer parts who were happy to use HP finance. That said it definitely wasnt everyone and if you didnt do the legwork you could definitely be trapped.

> I don't know if this was IT shrugging me off or if it was something real but some IT person at this big ISP I worked at told me that they cannot just buy an SSD — my windows box at work was running off of a hard disk in 2019 — and that there was some contract that said any computer hardware we bought had to be through HP or something like that and it takes many months it something like that.

Plausible - the hardware might be leased, and so you have no right to modify it. You have to pay them to modify it.

Same as if you leased a car, you cannot do the services yourself, you have to pay them (and an approved agent of theirs) to do it.

We could only book our business travel through American Express. It must have made economic sense at the c suite level, I wasn't seeing it at my level, the flights were consistently more expensive.

What is short sighted is parroting this over and over. It's not insightful, interesting or adding anything else to the discussion than "mean people are bad".

It’s also possible to bankrupt a company with excessive focus on the long term.