Cringely - IBM's "Logan's Run"

IBM has elaborate incentive systems that encourage employees to patent every idea that comes into their heads, and few checks to weed out the bad ones. The plan, I suppose, is that it's hard to identify the important patents in advance, and it's worth it to spend millions a year on useless paperwork if every now and then it makes you 100x that.

Taking one of IBM's patents as revealing of their overall strategy is like watching a guy scratch his toe and concluding that he probably wants to amputate his leg. There's just no way to connect your observation to any evidence for (or against) the conclusion.

I found the article rather sensationalistic, but one of the comments rings true with regard to globalization of knowledge work in general:

"...you end up with a barbell distribution – a bunch of those rare people who can work through systems they’ve never seen before and fix them at the top, and a bunch of people to act as interchangeable cogs at the bottom..."

If you cannot quickly add value to systems & technologies you've never seen before, you're probably a depreciating commodity. IBM is merely riding this wave.

Hopefully the 50+ year olds will manage to transfer the key piece of information to the 18-25 year olds - what they get paid and how to get that same salary.

Nathan Myrvold has a patent factory project that goes quite a bit further than this. There was an interesting business week article on it a while back:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_27/b3991401....