ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES
CHAPTER EIGHT
SOFTWARE ENVY
Mitch Kapor, the father of Lotus 1-2-3, showed up one day at my house but wouldn’t come inside. “You have a cat in there, don’t you?” he asked.
Not one cat but two, I confessed. I am a sinner.
Mitch is allergic to cats. I mean really allergic, with an industrial-strength asthmatic reaction. “It’s only happened a couple of times,” he explained, “but both times I thought I was going to die.”
People have said they are dying to see me, but Kapor really means it.
At this point we were still standing in the front yard, next to Kapor’s blue rental car. The guy had just […]
I heard from dozens of readers this morning about a message IBM sent to its current employees concerning their 401K plan — changing it from a contribution in every paycheck to a single contribution at the end of the year. Of course if you are laid off that means no annual contribution, less retirement savings, but a real bonus to the company. This, in itself, isn’t worth a column. It’s just Scrooge IBM being more Scrooge-like in search of that 2015 earnings target. What is worth a column is putting this news in the context of IBM having failed its recent internal security audit, which should concern IBM customers.
I struck a chord with my recent column on H-1B visa abuse, so I’ll be following later today with an enormous post that tries to explain the underlying issues. But before then here’s something I came across that doesn’t quite fit that theme but was too interesting to let pass unnoticed — how companies like IBM intimidate employees and discourage them from speaking up.