These are funny, and their humor should be treated of how evidence of malfeasance really reveals itself: not in smoke-filled rooms, but silly emails between CEOs beefing over a talented employee.
Ever work on a project for the C-suite that had a lot of urgency, some strange amount of substance and a huge amount of bs that resulted in some huge action/deal but when you sit back and think about it nothing really of value was made?
Yeah you just worked on the coverup for the country club deal that got made weeks ago.
No, this is likely not the reason in this particular case. If email were a replacement for face to fact negotiation, sales people would have stopped taking flights 25 years. Instead, sales at the b2b level is still filled with travel and relationship building.
Humans like humans showing up in person and to blow smoke up their ass. They don’t say that but it’s what they really like and they respond to it in the form of being less ruthless when it comes to cutting ties, etc.
Humans also like that in person meeting to be a swanky ski village for them and their WaGs. Or some resort at an exotic beach location. Or some high end club. Or some other type of payola type of arrangement. Those are kind of hard to do over email
you're mythologizing and neglecting the market-wide knock-on effects of rampant illegal wage theft collusion like this.
Which, of course, they eventually did.
If anything, I take this email to be indicative of how companies can lose sight of the effect on their actual employees of market strategization. Jobs isn't worried about having to pay his team more here; he's worried that he's about to see the world's largest online advertiser launch a browser that could cut Apple's control of their users' online experience out from under them. If anything, I don't think they're really thinking about how much people need to get paid (which is, indeed, a problem).
fighting poaching through collusion is functionally equivalent to wage suppression. you're mythologizing. these are billionaire businessmen, they fully grasp the intent and result of their actions. wage suppression is the whole game whether legal or illegally played. that's their profit.
What apple is seeing here is a company they believe to be a partner pulling key staff away from an extremely important project to them (Jobs took the success of Safari very personally), which they didn't anticipate because that's a partner harming them on what they believe to be a shared goal. It's like "dudes... You want Safari to succeed too. Why are you pulling away the staff that would make it succeed?" Which is why I suspect he jumps to the conclusion that Google is working on a competing browser, not the Google is simply following recommendation chains and executing their standard strategy of hiring the smartest people in the room.
Google was also trying very hard to build and maintain a coalition of smaller browsers (at the time) that can compete with IE's complete stranglehold on the technical web ecosystem by virtue of its sheer mass. Apple is a notoriously fickle partner in any kind of technical coalition (note how they got bored with other companies dragging their heels on the usb-c standard and released their own standard several years earlier). They had the leverage of both their own browser and their mobile phone platform to position against Google or towards Microsoft if they chose to.
History might have played out very differently if most search traffic from the Apple platform was going through MSN instead of Google.
Interesting that this pivots from an antitrust problem related to employers to an antitrust problem related to the browser market. Artificially binding negotiations of one market to another to prevent competition is bad too.
Anyway, most of the above have little to do directly with wages and a lot to do with pride, bullying, control and/or things that smell a lot like narcissistic injuries (see also former presidents and current tech CEOs prone to meltdowns). I'm not a psychologist or play one, though, so take that with a grain of salt.
Eric and co. simply appeased him way too often. They did push back and occasionally even troll him (like the night before the Nexus One launch), but nowhere enough. If only they had penned a reply like Palm's.
For engineer, compensation is not everything, regardless of money, going to google to build a browser would easily look like a good idea at the time.
Sounds like a traitor to me ...
> So a compromise would be to continue with the offer we have made (to [REDACTED]) but not to make offers to any of the others unless they get permission from Apple.
This right here should be illegal. Where one chose to work should be 100% on your own accord. That a employer I want to work for/wants me to work for them would collude with my current employer to not hire me based on the whims of the CEO seems like a bad outcome for everyone, including the employer which would "retain" me.