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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Steve had the lawyers in mind he he wrote it.

"I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this".

The phrase "very pleased" implies to me that there is no pressure whatsoever, but nonetheless it would be great if it happened.

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Or maybe he knows Eric Schmidt doesn't take orders from him and therefore it's politically inaccurate to make a demand? Many leaders with people skills will say "i prefer if you did x" or similar when appropriate because they know they can't control everyone, it gives the person they are talking to an out and preserves everyone's ego, etc.

If memory serves, Erik personally had a business relationship with Apple at the time. He may have been a board member or advisor... So he actually did take _some_ orders from Steve.

This also isn't the only threatening email from Steve to Erik. There was a Google labs project that had been approved by apple legal that got an angry email from Steve too. The lawyers signed off, so Google was protected but it didn't prevent swift action. (The lab project was taken down but the dev was not in trouble.)

Yes, Erick served on Apple’s board at the time.

Yes, Eric was on the board so he would be in the position to order, board member don't take order from CEO, they give. In this case, I think it was a friendly communication between two tech leaders.

> board member don't take order from CEO, they give

Theoretically. In practice, Steve Jobs wasn't taking orders from Apple's Board in 2007.

They had an agreement pre-established. I think he was just being polite. Versus "yo we agreed not to do this".

This is called speech mitigation, btw (Coined by pop-psychologist Malcolm Gladwell). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitigated_speech

Lol. This type of phrasing has never inoculated the speaker from guilt, or deniability of an order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

This is also the guy who basically wrote a letter to the public / app developers that said 'you can't use flash' so blatently the DoJ, SEC and FTC were roshambo'ing each other to see who got to sue him first.

i have no idea why you are downvoted, and surely it's not this, but figured I'd mention, it's "Rochambeau", a name.

> it's "Rochambeau", a name.

"Connections to the French surname Rochambeau are a folk etymology"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rochambeau

suggesting that you know that saying "Rochambeau" is unconnected from the French name Rochambeau is a folk etymology. Saying we can't identify any connection between this word and a person with the same name is closer to the truth.

But the same wiki also lists my spelling as correct. So you're really not contributing anything?

It's both, either, or neither. The spelling he used is common and widely accepted. According to legend Rochambeau played it, but there is no evidence for that. The earliest written reference to the word doesn't spell it like the French general's name, though similar enough to plausibly be a corruption of it. However it may also be a corruption of the japanese name for the game.

Anyway, I'd guess he was downvoted because a lot of people here have an old justified hate of flash and thought his comment signaled tribal allegiance to the opposite camp.

> i have no idea why you are downvoted,

The decision to prevent Flash from operating on iOS was never considered as cause for lawsuit by any of the agencies mentioned by GP.

SFGate[1] reported at the time that exactly what I said happened happened. IIRC Apple later mooted any regulatory action by reverting their developer policy change. But for a while, it was looking pretty sketchy. And I think it's telling that the Thoughts on Flash letter is no longer available, taken offline at around the same time antitrust suits started up again.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20100510113916/http://articles.s...

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