| I live in a town with a sizeable IBM office. The number of tendrils coming out of it is crazy. To the point where everyone knows someone who is employed by IBM. I wouldn't say it's only megacorps. Universities have internship courses with IBM, and IBM have both normal and research contracts with the universities. Even tiny universities with less than a hundred students. All the banks have contracts with IBM. All of them. There are hardware contracts, software contracts, and customised development versions of both of those for the banks. Most of the schools also have IBM contracts. Not generally customised development, just deployment of prebuilt hardware and preconfigured software. Even the kindergartens do. All the ISPs have support contracts. They tend to be more secretive about what the contracts are, but from what I hear it's mostly prebuilt hardware and very slightly customised software, and the support contracts are where IBM make the most of the income from the various contracts with the ISPs. All the hospitals have contracts. Customised hardware contracts, but boring and preconfigured software. However, the support contracts are fairly busy and IBM have a really high turnover in the teams that support the hospitals. The government buildings, of which we have local, state and federal, all have IBM hardware in them. Some of which has been under active support for three decades. Software wise, though, the government is edging away from IBM due to some recent fuckups that have seen IBM blacklisted for new contracts. |