The uncanny similarities between the IBM mindset and that of the Kremlin has been rehearsed often enough – it seems too much of a coincidence that the company started practising glasnost and perestroika only months after Mikhail Gorbachev added the words to the major lexicons of the world – but the strange allure of totalitarian nostrums to IBM is positively eerie: answering software developers’ complaints that trying to achieve Systems Application Architecture compliance was made impossible by the fact that the thing is an ever moving target, an IBMer told Computer Systems News cheerily that development of SAA would continue perpetually – As an architecture, hopefully, it will never end, he said, making it pretty clear that IBM has now adopted Mao Tse Tung’s doctrine of perpetual revolution.
