Sergey Brin: "Irate Call from Steve Jobs" (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Sergey Brin: "Irate Call from Steve Jobs" (2005)

twitter.com

45 pointsmooreds15 comments

This illegal collusion and wage suppression in our industry still occurs, it’s just kept better under wraps now as the executives have learned how to not write things down and use signal disappearing messages.

Is non-solicitation illegal collusion?

If it is, does that mean that they are legally obligated to try and steal Apples employees? What does that even look like from a practical point of view? How is that enforced?

I am aware of all of the other cases of collusion and wage suppression, but I’m interested in this specific email only, since you wrote “This illegal collusion” is it really?

I’m not being deliberately provocative I am genuinely curious - the reason I’m kind of pushing on definitions is because slimy corporate lawyers will weasel as much as they can, so I’m just playing devils advocate if anything - on a personal level I agree 100% with you!

> If it is, does that mean that they are legally obligated to try and steal Apples employees?

No, it means they're legally obligated not to conditionally agree with Apple that neither of them will steal each other's employees.

> What does that even look like from a practical point of view? How is that enforced?

Motive is a prominent part of legal . It's not easy to prove obviously, but it's not anything particularly unique to this type of case.

> No, it means they're legally obligated not to conditionally agree with Apple that neither of them will steal each other's employees.

This is the bit I didn’t understand, that makes a lot more sense, thank you!

This was part of (or lead to?) the general non-poaching agreement. The companies involved lost that. I got a check for a few thousand bucks.

Now they can even filter it via AI companies.

> ... wage suppression in our industry still occurs ...

Wage suppression among our kin where we make more $$$ than 95% of the population. Cry me a river.

> [...] where we make more $$$ than 95% of the population [...]

That doesn't make a difference. Suppressed wages are suppressed wages.

But, since you care about the comparison, people doing the suppressing are making even more.

For those not aware, the end result of this was a $415M settlement paid out to ~65K tech workers, for an average of $5800 a pop.

Not xitter (and more context): https://substack.com/@techemails/p-94286303

> on another note, it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unificaiton strategy that we can get these two to pursue. combined, they certainly have enough marketshare to drive webmasters.

Was 2005 really such a different time with respect to monopolies that someone like Brin would actually think it's "silly" for more than one browser to have significant market share? Wasn't Microsoft punished also for bundling IE with Windows?

The context here is that IE has absolutely dominated the browser market for years in 2005.

So I read it as “Given we’re trying to have an alternative to IE, it’s silly for us to further fracture the ecosystem, rather than collaborate on a viable contender.”

Wikipedia shows november 2005 browser share as 88% IE, firefox at 8%, and netscape+other at 2%. (not sure why this doesn’t add up to 100%)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

I suppose we have to assume that it wasn't Brin's idea to launch the Chrome browser 3 years later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com