It struck me when reading it that For Want of a Nail really is the first AH timeline, complete with a focus on election tables (while large amounts of violence gets skimmed over). It’s also racist at times, which is pretty normal for a book written in 1973 but that’s a foible of a lot of AH timelines - both because the wish fulfilment attracts people on the fringes, and it’s easy to fall into that if you only ever have a birds’ eye view of a scenario.
Kramer Associates is, I think, the biggest thing that it does right while being still quite original. The idea of there being a cross between Chiquita and the British East India Company is very plausible too. I will say, it did get quite ridiculous when it somehow separated itself from the metropole successfully. In general, megacorporations like this are dependent on the metropole, by its sufferance or support or otherwise, and though they often deform the metropole’s government to keep power, if the metropole wants them dead, they die. The East India Company put up a fight to efforts within Parliament to regulate it and even succeeded for a while, but ultimately it did fold after they got passed. I don’t really buy the idea that a megacorporation could survive being separated from the metropole, much less be the first to build a nuke. That said, it’s an interesting idea.