WI: Adriano Olivetti survives?

[Neoteros]

Italian entrepreneur Adriano Olivetti died in 1960, at the age of 58, under very suspicious circumstances - declassified CIA documents hint at how the US secret services were monitoring him, both due to his business' status as a leader in the early IT sector, and as a clear rival to IBM's interests (the CIA's assassination of his employee Mario Tchou, and of the oil tycoon Enrico Mattei, are other examples of this murderous strategy), and due to his... unorthodox political views, that incorporated elements of paternalistic conservatism and utopian socialism, views that formed the basis of his Community Movement, a small federalist, municipalist party that was able to gain a couple Parliament seats.

What if Adriano Olivetti was able to die in his old age? For bonus "what if" content, you can make the other personalities I mentioned survive, alongside other CIA-targeted figures; perhaps, the whole plot is unearthed outright. What would be the consequences, for the energy and information technology field, of the survival of Adriano Olivetti and/or Mattei, Tchou, et cetera? I can totally see Olivetti try and replicate with computers what they were able to do with typewriters, with cheap, ZX Spectrum-like personal computers becoming ubiquitous in Italy - maybe, to save money, they could even use television screens as monitors, taking advantage of teletext technology since the early 1980s.

@MusuMankata @AndreaConti @Beatriz

 

[MusuMankata]

To my understanding, Adriano Olivetti was a staunch believer in typewriters remaining all-important for a long time, with computers being an important investment for a future he wasn't going to see. He might be swayed by Mario Tcho at a later point, since Adriano could be plausibly still alive in the Eighties and Nineties– if as a rather old man– but the chances of Olivetti (the company) competing with IBM are slim without a successor that fully committs on what was, in hindsight, the winning horse.

But this is strictly talking on the technology side of things. Politically, the issue with having the "Community Movement" spread, is that the big parties of the First Republic were too much of a juggernaut to be broken up by an entrapeneur's ideas, and without a Tangentopoli/Mani Pulite moment to wipe the slate clean, I can't see it becoming big enough to lead to, say, amending the constitution to create a fully-federal Italy, or have the various legal codes amended to give more powers to individual municipalities to the detriment of provincial and regional power, even if absorbed by either the PSI or the DC. With time it might create a hardcore base of business owners acritically voting for it in Lombardy and Piedmont, though, much like how the PCI basically controlled all of Tuscany except Lucca, or how Lega Nord had a monopoly on Veneto's politics.

 

[Neoteros]

To my understanding, Adriano Olivetti was a staunch believer in typewriters remaining all-important for a long time, with computers being an important investment for a future he wasn't going to see. He might be swayed by Mario Tcho at a later point, since Adriano could be plausibly still alive in the Eighties and Nineties– if as a rather old man– but the chances of Olivetti (the company) competing with IBM are slim without a successor that fully committs on what was, in hindsight, the winning horse.

But this is strictly talking on the technology side of things. Politically, the issue with having the "Community Movement" spread, is that the big parties of the First Republic were too much of a juggernaut to be broken up by an entrapeneur's ideas, and without a Tangentopoli/Mani Pulite moment to wipe the slate clean, I can't see it becoming big enough to lead to, say, amending the constitution to create a fully-federal Italy, or have the various legal codes amended to give more powers to individual municipalities to the detriment of provincial and regional power, even if absorbed by either the PSI or the DC. With time it might create a hardcore base of business owners acritically voting for it in Lombardy and Piedmont, though, much like how the PCI basically controlled all of Tuscany except Lucca, or how Lega Nord had a monopoly on Veneto's politics.

AFAIK, Tchou pushed for a younger, IT-savvy Olivetti before his death so, even if Olivetti doesn't end up dabbling in IT in Ivrea, the pre-existing detachment of the company devoted to IT, near Novara, could grow and eventually eclipse the main company - even though having mechanical computer keyboards explicitly modeled after the Lettera 22 in their aesthetics could be one way to try and sway Adriano.