IBM has known how to play vendor lock-in and death by a thousand related products since before computers could fetch instructions from memory, when most of the

IBM has known how to play vendor lock-in and death by a thousand related products since before computers could fetch instructions from memory, when most of the world still thought just shipping what their customers need was where it’s at. (Evidently—if unfortunately for my worldview—that doesn’t contradict there being a lot of very good engineers there.) They may be dying a slow death, I don’t know for sure but I can imagine that, but just making their stuff worse for business reasons is not by itself a symptom of that—it’s simply part of their normal lifecycle.