Discussion
For tech workers who currently don't have a pee bottle or a suicide net at their job-site, it's long past time to get over this founder-in-waiting bullshit and get organized. Recognize that you're a worker, and that workers' only real source of power isn't ephemeral scarcity, it's durable solidarity:
https://techworkerscoalition.org/
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@pluralistic If you're into early tech history, read 'Hackers' by Steven Levy. Covers Gates and others in that era.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/09/temporarily-embarrassed-founders#solidarity-beats-scarcity
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IBM could have made its own OS, of course. They were just afraid to, because they'd just narrowly squeaked out of a 12-year antitrust war with the Department of Justice (evocatively memorialized as "Antitrust's Vietnam"):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/02/the-true-genius-of-tech-leaders/
The US government traumatized IBM so badly that they turned over their crown jewels to these two prep-school kids, who scammed a pal out of his operating system for $50k and made billions from it.
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@pluralistic
Or they just didn't take making a PC seriously. The only worse choice of CPU would have been the 8085?
The 8088/8086 was maybe the worst CPU to be marketed as 16 bits. Held back small business / home computing for nearly a decade and the stupidity of business use of Win9x instead of NT, RiscOS, BSD or Xenix etc.
Default IBM PC didn't have HW clock, serial, parallel or graphics and pretty poor Floppy (though better than Apple II).
Despite owing his business to IBM (or perhaps because of this fact), Gates routinely mocked IBM as a lumbering dinosaur that was headed for history's scrapheap. He was particularly scornful of IBM's software development methodology, which, to be fair, was pretty terrible: IBM paid programmers by the line of code. Gates called this "the race to build the world's heaviest airplane."
After all, judging software by *lines of code* is a *terrible* idea.
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@pluralistic I don't think paying buy the line of code is a terrible idea, especially back then, but IBM was doing it backwards, back then the goal was often make the code as small as possible, so paying for the least number of lines in a functional program would've made more sense.
@pluralistic No man thinking he is the top genius of the whole Earth, the pinnacle of human evolution, would ever think to do the same!
(I'm speaking of Musk ironically.)
To the extent that "number of lines of code" has any correlation with software quality, reliability or performance, it has a *negative* correlation. While it's certainly possible to write software with *too few* lines of code (e.g. when instructions are stacked on a single line, obfuscating its functionality and making it hard to maintain), it's far more common for programmers to use *too many* steps to solve a problem.
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The ideal software is *just right*: verbose enough to be legible to future maintainers, streamlined enough to omit redundancies.
This is broadly true of many products, and not just airplanes. Office memos should be long enough to be clear, but no longer. Home insulation should be sufficient to maintain the internal temperature, but no more.
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@pluralistic
I've long said this is true of writing as well. (You would not *believe* how many people who take part in written forms of RP don't know that good writing is as long or as short as it needs to be...)
Ironically, enterprise tech companies' bread and butter is selling exactly this kind of qualitative measurements for bosses who want an easy, numeric way to decide which of their workers to fire, and leading the pack is Microsoft, whose flagship Office365 lets bosses assess their workers' performance on meaningless metrics like how many words they type, ranking each worker against other workers within the division, with rival divisions and within rival *firms*.
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