By Richard M. Sherwin

 When I worked for IBM I thought I knew everything about the then largest computer company in the word. I had covered Big Blue as a reporter-columnist, had friends in many of its locations, and was in a mix of recent recruits from journalism and the scientific and marketing world during its biggest expansion ever.

 The rumors were always there: The founder Thomas Watson had helped the Nazis. And despite being headquartered in Westchester, N.Y., IBM allegedly stashed some of its assets in the Cayman Islands and Europe where it could avoid the billions of dollars in taxes on its massive profits.

 When I was there, it was apparent that many younger employees felt stymied by the old fashioned promotion practices, started by Thomas Watson, who  rewarded loyalty over talent. In fact,  some employees bolted for Apple Computer, Microsoft and Dell, at that time considered more technologically savvy and more youth oriented and, in some cases, more patriotic if not more honest.

 After about three years at IBM, I learned that the tax dodges (hiding assets and profits with off shore divisions) were no worse than Ford (In fact Henry Ford had actually supported the Nazis by producing product for Hitler after many companies stopped doing business with Germany. IBM’s worldwide sales meetings didn’t have any more or less sex, drugs or dirty dancing than most big companies and the makeup of its personnel was not much different than other older established companies. They even had a few women bosses, Jews and people of color working there, and not every executive wore a suit 24/7, although there was an overload of Harvard and other Ivy League incompetents.

 But by the time Big Blue blew its consumer division apart by unusually stupid marketing (the last major PC maker to get their consumer products into retail stores; pricing the PCs and printers way above Dell and HP) . The consumer groups executive team was led by the Harvard types who had never stepped into a real retail store or purchased a consumer product, I had left the company.

 So I wasn’t surprised when I heard recently that Apple had hidden billions of profits on offshore divisions with zero employees. They could have made more of their best-selling product right here in the U.S., and it only would have cost them less than half of one percent of their awesome profits.

 The  late Mr. Jobs and now Mr. Cook, despite their cool jean clad outfits, turned out not much differently than IBM’s Mr. Akers or Mr. Gerstner. They both dodged taxes by forming make believe companies overseas with no employees. And just like IBM, they think they are smarter than their customers.

 But there was one big difference between behemoth IBM then and mega behemoth Apple now: IBM’s hardware was mostly manufactured in the U.S.A; Apple’s hardware is never made here.