In Reply to: Re: Why be surprised? posted by Fond Memories on 05 January 2004 at 18:03:02:
I'll give you a view from Corporate UK and Europe.
Until the early 80's IBM had won hardly any UK Government business due to a buy British policy (or certainly buy European). Then IBM used the prospective siteing of its PC plant in Europe at Greenock as a lever to get some slack. In fact I think it was Opel who called on Prime Minister Thatcher to sort something out. It worked.
A few crumbs were thereafter thrown. Nothing large. Say £10m tops a crumb.
There might have been more but IBM UK chose to go large thereafter on UK public corporations privatising, where it did very well indeed, and not on core Government departments where it got nowhere really. It did well by diverting investment cash for Central Government into those Corporations going public.
Anyhow that was a long time ago and no doubt things have moved on a deal.