Steve Jobs Threatened Palm with Patent Suit Over No-Hire Policy

thekev said:

That kind of information is protected by NDAs. Changing jobs does not mean you get to talk about secret projects owned by your former employer.

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Money and self importance has a habit of forgetting about NDAs especially if it gets your company a foot up on other competition.

Thinking some NDA is going to keep a person from using ideas you got from another companies hard work is naive.

That's why that do not call list was there to begin with.

I like the reply from the Palm guy.

Oletros said:

Why not? It is not illegal.

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Quite so.
But in that case, I think you'd see legislation move at an unusual speed.

I wonder how many more bits of evidence may come out regards the tyrant by the name of Jobs! Nasty bit of work!

Well we see Ed's style and we Steve's style.

Apple still exists.

Palm is a footnote in history.

thekev said:

That kind of information is protected by NDAs. Changing jobs does not mean you get to talk about secret projects owned by your former employer.

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NDAs don't work. NDAs are rarely enforced. NDA enforcement is almost impossible, because it's hard to prove if someone broke NDA.

If NDAs worked, then why the hell is MacRumors and other rumor sites revealing so many rumors every year (many that come to be true)? Fact. NDAs do not work. No one bothers to honor them. It's easy to anonymously conceal yourself so that you cannot be pinpointed. And the enforcers have a hard time proving that so-and-so broke their NDA contract.

Every single day here on MR, I see people engaged in closed betas and revealing what they saw during a beta of this game or that software. NDA is being broken on a daily basis. No one cares about NDA.

Solomani said:

Eric Schmidt could be just as guilty as SJ. But only SJ will get the criticism and flak from the Big Media.

But Schmidt will likely get a free pass, because... most people, even 99% of Android users, have no clue who the hell he is, or what he looks like.

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Yeah Eric Schmidt didn't want a paper trail. Hmm...I wonder why.

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wxman2003 said:

What did all that chest beating get Steve Jobs? A nice plot where the worms are eating him now.

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Wow really classy there.

From the Verge:
Steve Jobs: "It is not just a matter of our employees deciding they want to join Palm.
They are being actively recruited using knowledge supplied by Jon Rubenstein and Fred Anderson,
with Jon personally participating in the recruiting process. (...)"

So employees are free to work at Palm if they want to.
Not sure I wouldn't try to stop Palm hiring my employees.

Unggoy Murderer said:

Yeah, I do... Steve was doing what he could to do what was right. Palm wasn't playing ball. The agreement between the big companies wouldn't exist if it was wrong or unfair. And, did you even read the links that were served to you?

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There's a reason why this is in court.

Such behaviour is illegal. Aka "wrong and unfair".

Palm even pointed that out directly to Steve (and hence Apple). This means that Apple can't even claim they did it in good faith, or because they thought it "was right" (as you put it).

Employees have the right to change where they work. This is a basic human right we have in the west. What Apple, and Google, etc, did was disgusting.

Solomani said:

Wow... that list is like.... ALL of the big players in the US tech industry.

Oh but let me guess.... the Media selectively reports Apple as the only guilty party in this whole fiasco.

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No, they didnt. If you click the link posted at the top of the page you quoted me on, you'll see that there are a lot of companies implicated.

So no. Nobody is singling Apple out here. Half of Silicon Valley was involved in it.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3...e-jobs-and-eric-schmidt-didnt-want-you-to-see

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sinsin07 said:

Well we see Ed's style and we Steve's style.

Apple still exists.

Palm is a footnote in history.

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Uh only because they were bought out. You make it sound like they failed or something. Palm were hugely successful at what they did, and WebOS is the legacy of that - a very well made, solid OS. It's just a shame HP crippled it.

Solomani said:

NDAs don't work. NDAs are rarely enforced. NDA enforcement is almost impossible, because it's hard to prove if someone broke NDA.

If NDAs worked, then why the hell is MacRumors and other rumor sites revealing so many rumors every year (many that come to be true)? Fact. NDAs do not work. No one bothers to honor them. It's easy to anonymously conceal yourself so that you cannot be pinpointed. And the enforcers have a hard time proving that so-and-so broke their NDA contract.

Every single day here on MR, I see people engaged in closed betas and revealing what they saw during a beta of this game or that software. NDA is being broken on a daily basis. No one cares about NDA.

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Take a shot for every time Solomani wrote "NDA" in this post!

bushido said:

why not just add a clauses to your employees contract that prevents u from going to the competition within a certain time period. thats the most common thing here. like if i was working at IBM i could not quit and go to the competition working in the same field for 2 years or so

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Those clauses are most likely unenforceable, because they are a restriction on the rights of someone to work where they like.

Unless: the employer is offering restitution for the clause. E.g., you quit, we'll pay you $X per year for two years and in return you won't work for {list of companies}.

The problem with non-hire agreements is that going over to a competitor to see if you can get a higher salary is a rather common tactic to try and get a raise.

Especially if you DO want to further your own agenda.

The non-hire list means you wouldn't even be able to work on something relatively similar if you decided you didn't want to work at that company anymore. In other words, a good portion of your hands-on experience would be off limits for a while.

How the hell is that fair to you?

AppleLover12345 said:

Well, aside from the upper management, what you're proposing is already happening.
Over half of Silicon Valley employees as Asian. IBM is also replacing almost all their American R&D staff with Asians & Indians. IBM expects by the latter-half of this decade, over 70% of their engineers will be of Korean, Chinese, Japanese or Indian descent.

And American patriots like LagunaSol and Iconoclysm still think Americans are the ones who lead in technology and make technological breakthroughs. Denial at its best, heh?

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They're trying to change that too, to be fair.

Here in Taiwan educators are starting to get nervous and think of new techniques for teaching creativity. As it stands, most students kill themselves to "pass the test" and spend so much time studying, then in cram schools, that there isn't much time for creativity while growing up. Educators here are, and I paraphrase, worried that the next Steve Jobs won't be Asian because of the education system. Instead, their students will be good engineers but won't have any vision or think of anything revolutionary, they'll just be cogs in the machine.

Hattig said:

There's a reason why this is in court.

Such behaviour is illegal. Aka "wrong and unfair".

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The meaning of "wrong and unfair" is forever changing.

Up until 1967 it was illegal to marry interracially in some parts of the United States. Just because something is illegal doesn't automatically make it "wrong and unfair."

Working in publishing a tinpot publisher tried to have me sign a contract saying I wouldn't find employment with a laundry-list of vague competitors.

I just refused to sign as it was a laughably amateur document that would have no basis in law.

So why would a talented engineer want to leave Apple an work for Palm? Could there be something about the Apple culture? Or is that cult-tire.

MacRumors said:

during the last year or so, as Apple geared up to compete with Palm in the phone space, Apple hired at least 2% of Palm's workforce. To put it in perspective, had Palm done the same, we'd have hired 300 folks from Apple. Instead, to my knowledge, we've hired just three.

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So wait, Steve Jobs goes out, hires 2% of Palm's workforce, but then threathens Palm over 3 employees ?

And some of you people defend such an hypocrit move ?

Personally, I hope this trial brings to light all of these illegal moves by all tech companies and makes the sector more comeptitive for employees so that all of us working in the field can get the salaries and advantages we deserve, instead of artificially being limited by these oligopolies looking out for the pockets of people who have no clue about tech.

AppleScruff1 said:

And he really lowered himself to achieve certain things. He sure didn't like competition.

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Steve loved competition. He loved when people were challenged and driven to beat out the competition.

He despised companies hiring head hunters and gleaning IP from present staff using massive incentive practices to bring them on board.

Ask Nvidia in 6 months how much it liked poaching AMD staff. To date, 140,000 pages of IP was stolen by 4 top engineers at AMD as they embarked for lucrative positions at Nvidia.

Coincidentally, Nvidia has made some great strides in their GPGPU architecture designs of late.

Intel loved poaching so much from AMD they've had to pay $2 billion to date for those honest practices.

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kemal said:

So why would a talented engineer want to leave Apple an work for Palm? Could there be something about the Apple culture? Or is that cult-tire.

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Simple: Triple the salary, promise of massive stock options when the company value rebounds and position of higher importance.

Peace said:

Money and self importance has a habit of forgetting about NDAs especially if it gets your company a foot up on other competition.

Thinking some NDA is going to keep a person from using ideas you got from another companies hard work is naive.

That's why that do not call list was there to begin with.

Click to expand...

Solomani said:

NDAs don't work. NDAs are rarely enforced. NDA enforcement is almost impossible, because it's hard to prove if someone broke NDA.

If NDAs worked, then why the hell is MacRumors and other rumor sites revealing so many rumors every year (many that come to be true)? Fact. NDAs do not work. No one bothers to honor them. It's easy to anonymously conceal yourself so that you cannot be pinpointed. And the enforcers have a hard time proving that so-and-so broke their NDA contract.

Every single day here on MR, I see people engaged in closed betas and revealing what they saw during a beta of this game or that software. NDA is being broken on a daily basis. No one cares about NDA.

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The difference is those tools (NDAs) are legal. Collusion and the tactics mentioned here are not. Macrumors can grab info from a wide range of sources. Sometimes sources speculate on things as simple as traffic in and out of a given factory. These are still nonsense as they limit potential job opportunities.

AppleLover12345 said:

And people call Samsung scum.

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samsung is scum.

Steve Jobs didn't mind poaching employees from other companies such as Xerox PARC and Palm, but he hated others enticing his people.

--

Remember when he was forced out of Apple, and he told the board he was going to take a few "minor" employees with him to create NeXT?

Turned out he took some of the top people with him, instead. The board was furious.

Six days later, Apple sued Jobs and accused him of various misdeeds, such as stealing Apple inside info.

(However, the lawsuit backfired because it simply gave NeXT more cred in the Valley. Very similar to Apple threatening Palm WebOS later on. Just gave Palm more cred.)

JoeG4 said:

The problem with non-hire agreements is that going over to a competitor to see if you can get a higher salary is a rather common tactic to try and get a raise.

Especially if you DO want to further your own agenda.

The non-hire list means you wouldn't even be able to work on something relatively similar if you decided you didn't want to work at that company anymore. In other words, a good portion of your hands-on experience would be off limits for a while.

How the hell is that fair to you?

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It's a no-poaching agreement not a no-hire agreement

mdriftmeyer said:

Intel loved poaching so much from AMD they've had to pay $2 billion to date for those honest practices.

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In what lawsuit about poaching AMD was Intel found guilty?

a0me said:

It seems to me that this story shows that Jobs was acting like a spoiled brat with an attitude, not that Apple as a company is acting like a criminal organization. Samsung on the other hand, is linked with the Kkangpae (South Korean mafia).

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And Apple is linked to the US mafia (Al Gore).