IBM may have made much money from their patents .... according to normal
accounting at least. But maybe they made the bulk of their money from
making their stuff freely available.
What am I meaning by this?
The great value of IBM, at least until fairly recently, was the huge
number of application programmes that were available. These were
available because IBM not only shared its information early but also
helped people who wanted to use their approach and helped to create a
whole system of available work that they didn't produce directly.
--
Michael McMaster : Michael@kbdworld.com
web:http://www.vision-nest.com/BTBookCafe/TIA/TIAmap.html
"I don't give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity
but I'd die for the simplicity on the other side of complexity."
attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations
For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>