The anecdote regarding socks was essentially an analogy to the corporate culture at IBM.

In the video it was mentioned how traditional and conservative the culture is at IBM. Employees, typically men, had to wear white starched collared shirts with a suit jacket and tie.

Socks were mentioned because employee socks needed to be gartered! Can you imagine working in an environment that is so restricting?

The corporate structure is rampant at IBM and everything follows a strict protocol. These bureaucratic processes were very time consuming and unproductive, and when IBM announced that it wanted to build a PC in less than one year it was very shocking.

The sock anecdote can also be viewed as an opportunity compare the corporate cultures at the newer startup companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Intel vs. the traditional companies such as IBM and Xerox.

The newer startup companies were created by young men who sometimes dropped out of college. Often times these young men were hippies or more liberal in their thinking.

They may not have intended to start a company, but through the efforts of their play and their creative genius, new products emerged that were in high demand.

These new companies, unlike their predecessors, had no dress code. There were no hours to be put in except for the time you wanted to work, but in most cases the employees worked madly for hours at a time; sometimes without showering.

Most of the employees were computer geeks or nerds, and they had coolers stocked with Coca-Cola and other beverages. It is mentioned in the film, that these companies felt more like a college dorm than a workplace.