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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Companies like IBM are "American" only in the sense that (1) legally they are domiciled in a US state such as, say, Delaware; (2) physically they are headquartered in or near a major US airport; and (3) their shares are listed in a US stock exchange.

In most other ways, these companies transcend national boundaries. For example, many of them book a substantial portion of revenues through complex networks of "offshore" subsidiaries to avoid paying corporate taxes in any jurisdiction.[1]

[1] For example, see http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Doubl...

Edit: deleted reference to "Accenture," which is apparently legally domiciled in Ireland (thanks mschaef).

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Accenture is technically "Irish". It used to be "Bermudan". In either case, they have so many employees in so many countries, it's hard to imagine pinning them down to a single home country.

Us old timers remember them as "Andersen Consulting", the folks that got paid by our C-levels to drive the company into the ground...

IBM and Accenture are American in that that's where they were founded. This matters a lot: company culture is very different to change, and with the exception of departments that came forth of an acquisition, you can find elements of the founder's culture in most large multinationals.

Of course there are exceptions, as there always are, but I guess that from an employee's perspective, IBM looks and feels like an American company very much. Same holds for how sales teams interact with customers.

I would be interested in a comparison between experiences of Indian employees of Oracle and SAP, for instance. I have no clue, but I bet that it's tangible.

In all fairness, IBM is short for International Business Machines. Note how often they get dinged for their German branch "cooperating" with the Nazis (as opposed to ending up in the concentration camps themselves?).

Yes - they are very much multinationals both in customers and employees. I think the true sense of their being American (and this does include Accenture) is that is where they were founded, and did much of their early growth.

How and where they pay taxes is a vary important distinction.

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