Appalling.<p>Maybe somebody with a legal education that eclipses mine can chime in here, but isn't this whole exchange just mired in liability landmines? For starters, Jobs is trying to coerce a non-compete clause out of Colligan. To the best of my knowledge, that is just flat out illegal in California. Then we have the pretty much blatant threat of unrelated patent litigation if Palm chooses not to cooperate with the aforementioned hiring policy. Shouldn't that be regarded as extortion?<p>Would love to hear an expert opinion on why this exchange even took place in any traceable from. I imagine an Apple lawyer would see Jobs type this up and just burn the whole place to the ground...
Useful context for Jobs' response:<p>"Jon Rubinstein is an American computer scientist and electrical engineer who played an instrumental role in the development of the iPod. Jon Rubenstein left his position as senior vice president of Apple's iPod division on April 14, 2006. He became executive chairman of the board at Palm, Inc., after private equity firm Elevation Partners completed a significant investment in the handheld manufacturer in October 2007."<p>"Anderson previously served as executive vice president and Chief Financial Officer of Apple Inc. from March 1996 through June 2004.[1] He took over the duties of CEO after the ouster of CEO Gil Amelio and before the appointment of Steve Jobs as interim CEO.[2] His responsibilities at Apple included oversight of the companies controller, treasury, investor relations, tax, information systems, internal audit, facilities and human resources operations.[1] On June 8, 2004, Anderson was appointed to Apple's board of directors. On October 4, 2006 Anderson resigned from Apple's board following a three month investigation into Apple's stock option practices.[3]"
What strikes me most is the absolute single mindedness of Jobs, especially in contrast to Colligan's appeal to empathy. <i>This is not acceptable to Apple.</i> What a way to talk!<p>Colligan goes to great lengths to establish commonality, using rhetoric like "Like you, ...", "...as you said...", "We can both try...", "...big enough for both of us...". He invokes individual liberty, <i>"this is America!"</i>, rationalising and depersonalising his stance.<p>For Steve though, there appears to be one thing only: stop doing what you're doing. He belittles then intimidates, in clipped dismissive sentences. All Ed's appeals to reason seem to mean less to him than the mud on his boot. Stop. Doing. What. You're. Doing.
This should be Exhibit A in the case for patent reform. Patents are no longer a protectant for The Little Inventor; they are weapons that big companies can stockpile and use them to bully competitors.<p>With the smartphone market as hot as it is, wouldn't you expect to see thousands of companies making them? This is why you don't.
Interesting responses so far on HN I must say. It's a good thing for some here that Microsoft was found guilty for their bullying tactics because it gives people an out when comparing Apple and Microsoft, when in reality, in terms of aggressiveness they actually are/were one and the same.
I wonder if Mr. Colligan actually felt that way and was that principled/articulate, or if he either knew it was illegal or ran it by his lawyers to take the high ground in a letter which they thought would likely become public/discoverable later.
Somewhat related:<p>One thing that's always somewhat of a surprise to me is that as genius as a marketer as he was, Steve Jobs wasn't terribly eloquent. It's something I first noticed when watching his Stanford speech years ago and continued to pick up on throughut his various keynote addresses and leaked emails like the one in the linked document. His sentence structure was typically one-dimensional and vocabulary simple, which is probably why he was such an effective salesman -- he was easy to understand.<p>Being a strong, effective leader usually conjures up images of people who are prolific writers and great orators, or Bill Clinton-type masters of persuasion, but Steve wasn't any of that.
I don't find this email exchange appalling at all. What's appalling is the naive idealistic reaction here, that reeks of blindness to how business is practiced at scale.<p>I've been involved in this sort of anti-poaching discussion at senior levels before. It happens all the time, in many industries - particularly in jurisdictions non-competes are enforceable. When an executive leaves one place and goes to another (say a CIO or VP), they bring people with them. Often in violation of non-solicitation and non-compete agreements, which are a pain in the ass for everyone to enforce. So you do what you can to Stop. The. Practice.<p>In the case of California, Jobs didnt have a direct legal avenue to stop this so he wanted to use other threats to stop a competitor. That seems normal. If it was not legal, then his lawyers did him no favors. Immoral? Not at all. It's business.<p>The reaction here reminds me of Slashdot circa 98, clucking over leaked Microsoft memos. The hacker/open source idealism here seems way stronger than that of entrepreneurs or business people. Makes sense I guess.<p>Perhaps people love early stage companies here because they can ignore the dirtier parts of business after you have a product/market fit... like, competition.<p>Competition is dirty and messy. It's not a kid gloves "lets out innovate each other!" like you're toddlers in a sandbox not allowed to hit each other. It's about marketing negatively (see Samsung's anti Apple ads), aggressive sales and pricing (see the Nexus 7 sold at cost), stopping poaching (Apple above), and removing supply lines by buying them up (Apple with displays and flash memory).<p>Sure, business isn't JUST those things. It also is innovation. Preferably lots of it. But people here are a rather naive if they think most companies aren't spending over 50% of their time on the former. Apple is actually unique for their size in how much time it spends innovating rather than, to paraphrase Ray Kroc, "sticking a live hose in your competitor's mouth".
Steve Jobs was a megalomaniac.<p>Interestingly, his megalomaniacal tendencies actually produced things that others might not have been able to get done. In other words, it became a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy to live in his fantasy world where everyone should do exactly as he thought they should.
As someone making his living in various forms of IT, knowledge of this kind of thing is difficult for me. I find it so disgusting that it's very hard to stomach recommending technical solutions, or even investing in the equipment I need, when I know that it will aid in the prospering of these companies that will then use it for such ugly, immoral actions. The problem is you slowly learn of this kind of thing from every tech company and soon enough you're just disgusted with the whole IT career. Unless you are very lucky with your job options, you can't just retreat into some happy corner where you program in Lisp on Linux servers all day long. You have to get over it and put it at arms length or face the fact your career is going to be much less fruitful than it otherwise would be.
It's just an interesting little footnote in the history of Apple's rise to handheld superstardom.<p>Ed Colligan sounds very reasonable and level headed in his responses to Jobs' threats and intimidation approach.<p>However, Mr. Colligan basically led his company into insolvency, failing to innovate, failing to support his customers, failing to properly leverage the once-dominant Palm market share.<p>I was there in 2004, a happy user of the mighty Palm T3 which to this very day has some superior features versus the Android and iOS handhelds. My wife still misses her Zire.<p>I gritted my teeth and put up with Palm's steadfast refusal to support Linux; jpilot and pilot-sync filled in the gaps pretty well.<p>Then Palm decided to innovate by abandoning the PalmOS platform entirely and going with WebOS. Did they support Palm apps? Sure, as an extra cost add-on. Friends with Palm WebOS phones traded them in for Android as soon as they could; the units were buggy and crashy.<p>So in the long run, the support and innovation award has to go to Apple, and in my opinion it has less to do with employee poaching than with visionary and intelligent leadership.<p>Certainly you can't build a great company without great talent, but poaching from your competitors is only a small part of the story.<p>Then there's the stigma of being the poachee. Is it advisable to be known as someone who will jump ship and join the enemy for a few more pieces of silver? Is loyalty of so little value? In my opinion, there's great value in loyalty to one's company. If you must jump ship, at least spend a year elsewhere before joining the competition. It's a professional courtesy thing.
Why the current meme for examining Steve's entrails? Is anyone surprised at this exchange? One of Steve's lifelong obsessions was a wildly distorted idea of employee poaching. As someone who worked at two different companies that received these kinds of communications from Steve, I can say that he usually only struck out at companies he knew well, like Palm. Ed probably doesn't know it, but Steve actually threatened Palm in much the same way years earlier. He did the same sputtering act about prceived poaching with Motorola around 2005, which took some stones, since at the same time he and his guys were busy playing MOT like a pinball machine to teach them how to make phones and how to do business with AT&T. But that's another story. In both these instances, lawyers were dutifully involved, but the execs involved mostly just laughed it off. Steve being Steve.
Nothing in this correspondence surprises me. Just an everyday Steve Jobs.<p>What I worry about is his apprentice - Mark Zuckerberg. Who is possibly more brutal in his approach, and potentially far more <i>dangerous</i>.
Steve's letter is a disappointment to me. I wrote up my thoughts here, in a post entitled "It’s important not to worship any hero wholesale":<p><a href="http://dorkitude.com/post/41267859215/its-important-not-to-worship-any-hero-wholesale" rel="nofollow">http://dorkitude.com/post/41267859215/its-important-not-to-w...</a>
I see this as exploitation or price fixing in some way!
Let me elaborate. Lets say Steve Jobs was paying an Engineer $100K at Apple. That skill set might have been worth atleast $120K to Palm. So Palm decides to hire him giving him a decent raise to join ( a good incentive to join). Lets say Palm gives him $120K. Now Apple which secretly knows that the engineer is worth a lot more to Apple will have to throw in more than Palm, say they will have to offer 150K$ to draw him back. Palm might again counter offer and this kind of bidding might go on until the Engineer get his true value(In a way market is deciding the engineer's worth) - But what is happening here is that Steve Jobs is kind of colluding with Palm to "fix the price" of the Engineer without market deciding so! There by saving/making a boatload of cash (money saved is money earned)!
Sure, what I am saying is probably not the book definition of price fixing, but I would think that the motive/sentiment is very similar!
The difference in writing styles and the impact thereof. This really stood out to me.<p>The Palm CEO seems to really be on the defensive the whole time, even while countering the patent threat. Jobs, on the other hand, was short and deliberate.
This is surreal. Even though Steve Jobs is an inspiration for me, I actually agree a lot with Ed Colligan here.<p>A couple thoughts:<p>- It's definitely possible for both companies to have awesome teams. No one person is going to make or break either team.<p>- Employees should have a right to work where they want to. Part of this means that if I am a skilled employee, I'll get offers to come work for other companies. If I engage in a conversation, then it's perfectly alright for the company to actively recruit me. On the flip side, if I decline, they should back off. But, at the end of the day, it should be my choice. Both the company and employee need to win (which might be hard at times).<p>- Part of living in a free, capitalist, democratic society is the beauty that if an employee tries to leave, you can try to persuade them otherwise. This can be done in a variety of ways, but it comes down to taking the more appealing offer (that doesn't just have to be pay and title, but can also be the values of the company or the employee's lust for working at a particular company or their freedom to have a little less bureaucracy and instead experiment with new ideas, etc. etc.)<p>- I love the jab at the end, where Ed claims that Palm is not interested in getting or using confidential Apple information and also informs their employees of their duties to their previous employers
I think before people jump on the bandwagon they should think about Jobs state of mind when he wrote this.<p>iPhone just launched and still vulnerable. Senior staff going to a competitor and also Personally poaching staff and being involved in the interviews etc.<p>Let alone Jobs health issues etc.<p>Im not saying that Jobs was right, but we have the benefit of hindsight to see that the iPhone worksed, there was no guarantee of that happening.
This is almost entirely CEO-misdirection.<p>At any stage CEOs / founders throw their weight around in a mosh pit of entrepreneurialism. If someone they bounce into falls over or steps back, they know they are onto a winner and push harder. Get thrown back and they bounce randomly in another direction.<p>This sort of threat is common - it is useless to imagine it might be a potential partnership, there is no gain in it for Apple, it is just pushing in a mosh pit - push back then concentrate on making great products - the only thing that counts in the pit.
I am going to go against the grain here and say that what Steve Jobs is asking (e.g. stop direct recruitment of Apple employees) is not unreasonable.<p>Microsoft's continued poaching of Borland employees brought about the demise of the company, so I can see what he is worried about.
tldr:<p>I, Ed Colligan (ex Palm CEO), swear to god this happened:<p><pre><code> steve: let's not hire each other's employees anymore, m-kay?
ed: thanks steve, but no thanks.
jobs: have you seen our patents and pile of cash, ed?
you're entering a world of pain.</code></pre>
It seems that software patents have long become a case of "hate the game, not the player."<p>Although Steve Jos certainly was the most determined player I have seen on the corporate stage.
Direct link to PDF, look on page 8 or just search for Palm: <a href="http://www.antitrustinstitute.org/~antitrust/sites/default/files/945CLE.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.antitrustinstitute.org/~antitrust/sites/default/f...</a>
This is one of the cases where it is hard as hell to infer what tone Steve Jobs wanted to reply back with.<p>It sure sounds assholish but it is very well possible he knew that Palm was actively poaching and blatantly disregarding existing NDAs. Palm's CEO writes a fairly well measured e-mail but it is still a political dance.
I'd have to give it up for Steve - ruthless and firm! No doubt Apple has done so well. Love the guy! Especially loved the part where he says "asymmetry ... " and "you guys felt otherwise - patents" ... Haha! love the Jobs style!<p>Employees are mercenaries anyway - I think Steve did the right thing as the founder.