I won't pretend to have enough familiarity with the goings on in long past IBM management to be able to state with any authority what they may or may not have t

I won't pretend to have enough familiarity with the goings on in long past IBM management to be able to state with any authority what they may or may not have thought, but I'd be surprised if your single-minded characterization was close to accurate. If you read through the very long list of IBM published papers - you'll see that a lot of them covered novel solutions to real problems of the day that IBM was selling solutions for, in enough detail to save potential competitors a lot of time. That is a calculated risk that they've made for a long time (until pretty recently). It isn't difficult making the business case for what I've proposed... rumor has it that even Intel has recognized how badly they screwed themselves over by treating senior engineers as poorly as they did in the late 90s. The whole imperative to recruit motivated talent isn't a new thing that started with Google's masseuses and sous-chefs, R&D heavy industries have been mindful of the advertising value in publishing for a long time.