You can measure it by how many management steps you, as an employee of the recently acquired company are from the CEO in the hierarchy. As time goes on, this number tends to increase. It used to be easy to see this in Lotus Sametime or something that had some form of employee directory.

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framebit 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Fun fact: there's an IBM/Lotus Sametime theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daitUOzVpvc The lyrics rhyme "PC" with "easy."

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jhallenworld 15 hours ago | parent [-]

That's awesome. Before ~2007 they allowed you to use open-source Pidgin to connect to the Domino servers. A friend of mine and I used it to make a bot: if you sametimed me, you got Zork.

It reminds me of another IBM IT rule: they wanted your chat history (and email) older than two years to be all deleted for legal liability reasons. It was important to save your sametime chat history (an XML file) and export your email periodically if you wanted to keep this stuff.

This was actually better than Slack in one way- you could grep the files for things, and not have to rely on search within the tool.

	▲	rw_grim 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We (Pidgin) probably could have kept that code working if we had access to a server. But we didn't, and it bitrot, so we've since archived it to https://github.com/pidgin/retro-prpl/tree/main/sametime