

Cringely - IBM's "Logan's Run" - queensnake
http://www.cringely.com/2009/09/logans-run/

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jeffcoat
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.

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tom_b
This is absolutely correct - at IBM, successful patent applications based on
any idea you could come up with directly affected your reviews, ability to get
promoted, and general perception of worker bees by the management chain.

Patents incentives were also roundly ridiculed by lower band and longterm
employees at IBM. For individual contributor types, there was some expectation
that patents were part of the job description.

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cmars232
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.

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ojbyrne
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.

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xiaoma
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....](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_27/b3991401.htm)

