This is a tech board where anyone can post anonymously, so sockpuppeting and astroturfing are quite common, especially as employees of these companies post here. In every thread about Apple/Amazon/Google/Facebook/IBM/Microsoft/etc you'll always have to wonder who's behind that post or who clicked the upvote and downvote arrows.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8948778
One hypothesis... some of the IBM managers who were commenting on that story now realize Cringely was at least partly right?