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From: Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: antitrust history, The Design of Design
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 22:36:05 -0700
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John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:

> According to Tim Rentsch  <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com>:
>
>>> Sounds reasonable, and the reverse of what they did in the
>>> (far-away) past.
>>
>> IBM was forced to change what it did in the past as a
>> consequence of an antitrust action filed by the US
>> government.  And in fact there was more than one of
>> those.
>
> That's true but they didn't have that much practical effect.
>
> The 1956 agreement required that they sell equipment, rather than only
> leasing it, let customers buy their cards from vendors other than IBM,
> and some other related stuff.  A big deal then, irrelevant now.
>
> In 1969 they preemptively unbundled software and services, expecting
> that an antitrust suit could force them to do so.  There were many of
> antitrust suits through 1982, all of which IBM won or were dismissed.

Your impression of the history is rosier than mine.  The danger to
IBM was not that they would be forced to unbundle software but that
the court would decide the company needed to be broken up, and that
was a real fear on IBM's part.  In any case I wasn't making any
claim about how large the effect was (even if I might think it was
larger than what you think it was) but only that they were forced to
change by the antitrust action, which they were:  IBM management
certainly did not want to unbundle software, and they would not have
done so if they thought they had a choice.