Triumph of the Nerds part 2

The second part of Triumph of the Nerds made some things clearer to me because I have always wondered since I used computers as a little user, most of the time historically, knowing the way the things developed gives us a clearer point of view on the way the things are today.

It introduces the expression “Riding the Bear” and it was about importance that some critical decisions made the big guys (like IBM and Microsoft today). Also the documentary talks about a partnership between Microsoft and IBM and the fact that they (ms) bought what would later become MS-DOS at an almost trivial project or a fraction of what it is today makes the whole panorama be really impressive it was a game changer along with Bill Gates’s, urge to win and the  go-getter buy-mine strategy that Microsoft ended up developing was key in positioning itself.

In this portion of the series, I got to learn some of the history of IBM’s corporate culture, which is described as the American pinnacle of business. In my experience there are practices that never ever we will be seeing die, like the strict business dress code and the organized bureaucratic structure. Which even if I’m not very comfortable with I get to understand given by the fact that the “power distance” was the “natural selection” principle to get respect and prestige (something IBM bragged a lot about in the early PC days).

Another interesting piece of information was the dumb but somehow clever techniques used by the brands to successfully reach a market that they barely knew, and how IBM reacted slowly to the clones and copied products even when their “DRM-like” countermeasure was unfair at first, I think this was an historical step towards hardware standardization, (today that’s the way apple defines the looks of a standardized product). It’s still an arms race.