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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't appear to be. The email's intention appears to be accusing Google of poaching browser developers to build a competing browser to Safari. It's less about price and more about Apple changing their strategy if they conclude that a company they think is a partner has designs on competing directly with one of their key application offerings.

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).

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I feel like this is very close to saying.. "well, it was a felony, but they were very incompetent at committing it." Which, for people operating at their level of the industry, is damning either way.

None of this is to absolve them of responsibility. I mean it rather as a cautionary for anyone in this kind of decision-making: don't lose sight of the people in the story while you're strategizing on long-term business plans and business partnerships.

> It's less about price and more about Apple changing their strategy if they conclude that a company they think is a partner has designs on competing directly with one of their key application offerings.

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.

they were convicted of illegal wage suppression as a result of this.

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.

No disagreement that was the end effect. What I'm saying is it's interesting to observe how easy would be to slip from strategization to "oops we are illegally suppressing wages" without that being the intent.

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.

What war other than the bidding war for talent was Jobs threatening?

At the time, Google was the default search engine for Safari. Apple could have changed their opinion on that.

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.

Meh, even without the mobile platform, which they didn’t have in 2005, there were no good alternatives to Google search then and switching the default to something else would have hurt Safari more than Google. My money is on the bidding war.

Don't underestimate Jobs's willingness to be a petty asshole. At that time, Yahoo was still in play and Apple could even have been willing to back MSN.

History might have played out very differently if most search traffic from the Apple platform was going through MSN instead of Google.

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