The Lone Inventor vs. Corporate Bloat
«Yes, the middle manager does not always contribute directly to the bottom line. But he does contribute to those who contribute to the bottom line, and only an absurdly truncated account of human productivity — one that assumes real work to be somehow possible when phones are ringing, computers are crashing, and health insurance is expiring — does not see that secondary contribution as valuable.»
—”The Televisionary”
As Adam said, That article made me mad.
Indeed.
This is an amazing piece of propaganda in support of large corporations, using as an example Philo T. Farnsworth (the inventor of the television) and his failure to bring the television to fruition against competition from RCA. The article makes a lot of poor assumptions, but what really got me was the ‘computers crashing’ part of that quote.
The “computers are crashing” part is really frustrating, because in my opinion, it is exactly the “corporate bloat and superfluous middle managers” that lead to computers that crash all the time. Linux, the early Mac OS, BeOS, NeXT - they all show that a small team (perhaps not a single person, but certainly not a large corporation) can outperform a corporation when it comes to quality and benefit to the consumer.