Palm’s CEO emails Steve Jobs (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Palm’s CEO emails Steve Jobs (2007)

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258 pointsmfiguiere184 comments

Steve Jobs immediately got rid of "About boxes" and Easter eggs when he returned to Apple. Probably the right call if you want to promote a brand of professionalism for your company.

But it is a bit more than that. About boxes that indicated the engineers that worked on the software are kind of cute in a way — recalling a time when a couple of programmers could write The Finder.

Credits (and Easter eggs) also speak of a time when engineers, if not driving the boat, were at least given a good deal of leeway to sign their creations.

I feel like there were a cadre of engineers that Jobs tried desperately to keep out of the public eye around the time of iTunes, etc. Worried, I suppose, about poaching.

Presenting at WWDC turned out to be the best way an Apple engineer could pass out their resumé.

When the engineers were essentially muted I think it represented a power shift at Apple toward management, marketing, design.

Good for Apple. It served the company and the brand well. No one can argue with the stock trajectory.

I, on the other hand, miss the cowboy programming days.

It was an industrywide collusion to suppress wages.

Was? Companies still collude to suppress wages, albeit via layers of indirection. cf: Radford survey.

Was it? Engineers at FANG make absurd amounts of money even out of college. So, at the very least the collusion wasn’t very successful

Yes, it absolutely was. Well documented, complete with Justice Department litigation and settlements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

BTW, Facebook didn't participate, and was by some measures, one of the reasons the collusion didn't continue to succeed.

Salaries were suppressed until after the litigation that my sibling comment by compiler-guy cited. Salaries did not begin to take off until ~2011.

How overpaid are employees relative to the amount of money they are bringing into the company?

How much money a company makes should not matter. You get paid by how hard you are to replace and how important your task is to continued revenue.

You can make your company $1 billion a day, and save countless lives, but if you can be replaced easily, do you expect to get paid much?

> how important your task is to continued revenue

Yes, that's what I meant by how much money you bring into the company.

If you bring in $1B a day (and save countless lives) and I can easily hire another employee just like you, why wouldn't I have done so already? Perhaps that is your point?

Be that as it may, how overpaid do you think tech employees are compared to the cost of replacing them?

much more relative to the average worker in many other industries

You're neglecting the most crucial variable here: profit margin. These engineers are super cheap.

Year over year wage increases relative to all workers and competition for labor in the tech sector are the signals you want to use. Total mergers and acquisitions and number of discontinued software products would be good secondary signals.

Palm really should have been on board then.

To do illegal things?

The point was that Palm, like any tech company, would probably have loved cheaper labor as well.

Most companies will eagerly pursue profitable illegal action – and subsequently express sincere remorse that they were caught and punished.

Some won't. You can call that ethics or fear of being caught or whatever but it is of course morally better than doing the illegal thing.

> Good for Apple. It served the company and the brand well. No one can argue with the stock trajectory.

I will. Opportunity cost is the danger in focusing on the stock price beyond your existential financial needs.

What did silencing those engineers cost in terms of creativity and motivation? Yes Apple’s stock price went up, but at what cost? How many iPhone-level innovations did their corporate culture cost?

This exactly. It was Jobs himself who said "Real artists sign their work" - as in the (literal) case of the original Mac, which included the signatures of the Mac team including Steve Jobs.

Losing that sort of energetic and creative culture has short term and long term costs which are hard to quantify.

I’ve never thought of it that way. Come to think of it, I could name many of the influential people at Apple from the 1970s through the 1990s beyond the founders and CEOs. Bill Atkinson, Larry Tesler, Ike Nassi, Alan Kay, Susan Kare, Chris Espinosa, Johanna Hoffman, Jean Louis Gassée, Steve Sakoman, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman immediately come to mind. I can also name many of the key NeXT players, like Avie Tevanian and Bertrand Sertlet. However, with the exceptions of Jony Ive and Scott Forstall, I don’t know the names of key engineers and product designers at Apple these days. This may be due to Apple’s evolving culture of secrecy.

Outside of WWDC (which isn't even in person anymore) Apple doesn't seem to allow its technical staff to have much public visibility. On the other hand, the decline in visibility you cite might also correspond somewhat with a media shift toward the web and social media. I expect Apple has strict requirements regarding employee blogs and social media presence.

It's a shame, because Apple has great technical and design staff, and it would be nice to hear more from them.

But of course Apple is also a much larger company now than it was in the 1980s-2000s.

> However, with the exceptions of Jony Ive and Scott Forstall, I don’t know the names of key engineers and product designers at Apple these days.

Perhaps rather proving your point, neither is still at Apple!

Not sure if SJ was to blame, but your sentiment about the commoditization of software engineering is right on target. It was industry-wide.

It's true that teams had to grow in size as software got more complex. Was commoditization the best way to do it? It certainly aggregated power in the hands of management. That was probably an intended consequence.

One unintended consequence is that tech leads and staff engineers became increasingly selected more for political than technical merit. That in turn decreased the per-capita merit of the workforce as a whole.

Post-ZIRP and post-AI, a lot of layoffs are still ahead IMO.

Here's the complete (?) exchange between Colligan and Jobs (no login wall or linkrot),

https://www.techdirt.com/2013/01/24/steve-jobs-used-patents-...

Steve Jobs asking for a no poaching agreement is not just unethical but illegal. His threat about Apple’s greater financial resources is just so petty and low. It really changes my view of him.

There was a lawsuit about apple, google, intel, and adobe agreeing not to poach from one another. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...

Keep in mind that Ed Colligan wrote that email probably with the knowledge it would come to light.

Whether it was defensive or offensive, who knows. But the points he brings up aren't just critical issues for Palm, they're ones with very strong public optics.

Hell, half of them are going over facts Jobs fucking already knows, including their Siemens patent portfolio. It's a PR release waiting for a lawsuit.

Part of it is just life as an executive in today's culture where you know discovery is around the corner.

But part of it is calculated here.

Fuck man, I'm shifting around a few piddly gigabytes today just to get some work done.

Can you imagine the costs for corporations for email legal compliance? What a sad barrier to entry.

> Can you imagine the costs for corporations for email legal compliance?

7 years of storage in an environment controlled by SOX. There is no requirement that the storage be online or accessible by the originating user, and in most cases, there's good reason to specifically avoid this. As a result it's not as bad as you'd think.

Yes of course it's calculated. He was being asked to do something that was squarely illegal. Very good reason to think it would turn up.

Still, reading between the lines I see nothing but fairness and balance.

> It really changes my view of him.

his ruthlessness and misanthropy are pretty well known. he wasn't a nice or good guy, just effective at marrying design to marketing, and pushing a product.

The man who disowned his baby daughter being outed as an asshole. What next.

Thanks, this should be the link for the post, instead of the xitter paywal.

Note that the quotes in the article are abridged, the full emails are in the embedded PDF

Is there a central repository where all these tech emails are coming from or are they discovery from disparate court cases?

They are different court cases, usually popularized by techemails (https://www.techemails.com/)

And most importantly, no Twitter.

The company led by the petulant bully is worth trillions and the one led by the accurate, ethical, and reasonable person is defunct.

I thought the same, kinda sad isn't it? Palm's email to Apple was like a teacher talking to an unruly teen, but not insultingly so.

So what do we learn? Either Karma isn't real, or being a childish bully is the key to success. I'm not sure I like either answer.

> Either Karma isn't real

If you look not at the companies, but individuals...

Only the western mainstream version of karma is supposed to work within one's lifetime. The proper spiritual interpretations of it usually span multiple lifetimes. Not a huge believer myself, but I agree with your conclusion, this kind of short-acting karma surely doesn't exist. As demonstrated daily by the many horrible influential people.

I’d say Christianity relies pretty heavily on fears of the guy in the sky and what happens after you die

What happens when religion loses its place in western society though. Hummmm

Yes it does, but even this version is not the quick "what goes around, comes around" what people casually think karma is, or what media like /r/instantkarma reinforces (albeit playfully).

Karma is just not the only factor. It sure helps but Palm just had the wrong strategic vision and didn't have great marketing. WebOS was not a bad idea but they didn't manage to sell it well.

from my own experience and observations i'd say anti-karma is real. you do good, fate will punish you for it ;)

It looks like it's impossible to build a highly successfull public company as shareholders (likely because of eroded responsibility) will always prioritise profit over ethics

that would imply, rather simply, that we would have more ethical companies if public ownership was forbidden. but i don't think that would be true.

The entity with more integration had more power than the one without.

It's sort of why we have anti monopoly laws on the books.

It's not to penalize successful people it's to prevent their largess from becoming a financial bloodclot within their industry.

The petulant, unreasonable bully died of a treatable cancer while the much more emotionally intelligent, reasonable person lives on. Universe in balance. Jobs was a gaping asshole and the world is richer without him in it.

Capitalism is a system which favors acting in an unethical manner.

Which is why things like minimum wage laws, anti-cartel regulations etc exist

This is business it's not a friendly game of (whatever).

It was not just business. It was illegal collusion.

direct slavery is very profitable

> Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal.

Said in email, from one CEO to another, is this obviously intentional paper trail?

> Threatening Palm with a patent lawsuit in response to a decision by one employee to leave is just out of line.

Did that patent lawsuit happen? (And if it did, did this email, which suggested illegal activity, come up in discovery.)

This is high level chess, I am certain that Jobs read that as the opening legal salvo it is. That’s a bigger threat left implied, and the smaller one was made plain (patents).

No, Apple ended up licensing the patents (Jobs bluster was BS): https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-pays-10m-to-li...

That is quite amusing, but $10M is peanuts to Apple for some necessary patent licenses.

peanuts now, but peanuts then?

Yeah, even in 2007 Apple was a huge success already. Worth about $200 billion at the time, was earning about $3.5 billion a year in profit, and had $15 billion cash on hand.

https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2007/10/22Apple-Reports-Fo...

It might not have been fully BS; as the parent commenter mentions, having a paper trail might have been an intentional strategy to try to discourage Jobs from going forward with it.

> Said in email, from one CEO to another, is this obviously intentional paper trail?

CYA is SOP, esp. at the C-level

I've wondered about that.

My assumption: Two CEOs might get the most done with each other if they establish trust, and talk off-the-record. But if one looks like they're CYA-ing, that lowers trust, and eliminates some of the potential negotiations and opportunities.

In this particular case between Palm and Apple, I guess they're already in an adversarial situation, and Palm CEO kinda threatening with overt CYA maybe made sense under the circumstances. But, I guess Apple CEO in the future won't be willing to float any idea to Palm CEO that they don't want blabbed or used against them. So Palm CEO has basically written off a lot of potential hypothetical opportunities with Apple?

Or was this case more like it's mutually understood that Jobs was the one who was out of line, in outright illegal conspiracy, and so Jobs would accept Palm CEO's response in that light, and might still be willing to talk with Palm CEO about sensitive (but legal) things?

A well-written, thoughtful, and diplomatic response by Ed. I wonder if he was a good boss to work for

In 2007, shortly after Palm announced the Folēo, Peter Rojas of Engadget fame posted a “Dear Palm” letter that called for the Folēo cancelled [1]. A few days later, Ed had forwarded the letter to the executive [2]. A few weeks after that, the Folēo was cancelled [3].

He was probably working with the best information that he had, but going on the friendly advice of tech journalists may not have been the best move. Palm completely missed the boat on the netbook market.

Apple has milked Palm-firsts, like gesture-based UI (Prē) and mobile device mirroring to a computer (Folēo), since then to great success. Oh, what could have been…

[1]https://www.engadget.com/2007-08-21-dear-palm-its-time-for-a...

[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20071012033705/http://blog.palm....

[3]https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/09/palm-abruptly-cancel...

I agree with the criticism though, the Foleo looked like some kind of internet appliance anachronism straight out of 1998. I was fully on board the Palm train too (rip Pre)

I don't really know for sure, 2007 was a weird time. The iPhone launched that year with obvious deficiencies (no apps, no 3G) but managed to evolve into something much better quickly enough that it didn't really matter. The Foleo was really limited, but I'm not sure that would have killed it if they would have gotten subsequent versions right.

I don’t think we can even reasonably talk about Palm circa 2007 and iPhone 2007 in the same sentence.

PalmOS was an aging clusterfuck that was a PDA with cellular glommed onto it (and the good Treo’s of the era ran Windows Mobile, which was better in some ways but a ridiculous mess for its own reasons) and the iPhone, even without apps or 3G was such a revelation and improvement that it single-handedly reshaped not just mobile, but personal computing, nearly overnight.

The software the iPhone did have was truly impressive — at least for the core feature that really set it apart: the web browser.

The capacitive touch screen and the on-screen keyboard made mince meat out of every other mobile operating system in existence or even in development; Google completely changed Android from being a Palm/BlackBerry clone to being an iPhone clone as soon as they saw it. People were willing to jailbreak and reverse engineer their iPhones to run apps on it.

Palm, like most everyone else, was caught completely flat-footed. They weren’t working on webOS in 2007; their next-gen version of Palm OS (the name escapes me) was not going to set the world on fire and Windows Mobile (who they increasingly had offloaded software duties to) was also not doing super well. It took new investors (and management changes that included ousting Colligan, who by all accounts is a pretty great guy and who did lead Palm and Handspring well in different environments) and a brand new engineering team for Palm to create webOS, an OS that had a lot of promise but was still largely better as a tech demo than a finished product, and even with insane work, webOS launched 2 years after iPhone and couldn’t compete on hardware or software.

Foleo, which was from the older era of Palm, never could have worked. Ever. Even in a world without iPhone, it’s a dud. But with iPhone, it’s DOA before it even gets to production.

> heir next-gen version of Palm OS (the name escapes me)

It was called Cobalt.

https://www.palmsource.com/palmos/cobalt.html

I moved across the country to work for Palm on a secret project which was revealed to be the Foleo only after I started. I spent a year trying to make the web browser with a totally broken engine they had licensed from Access. Having blown their budget of 100k on the engine they were determined to stick with it. I was amused when it was announced and then canceled after I quit.

I was a developer at a third party developer writing Foleo software and I always wondered what was going on on the other side of the wall. The rumour I was told for the cause of all the delays was that some executive had decided the screen was too low resolution way too late in the project and everything had to be redesigned. Released a year or two earlier they might have been decent devices, IMHO.

But the Foleo was by all accounts a bad device (when Palm enthusiasts were able to use obtain nearly final release Foleo’s years later, this was vindicated by even the most strident of Palm fanboys). The price was ridiculous ($600 before a $100 introductory rebate) for a thing that also required a $400 or $500 phone to work.

It wasn’t a netbook at all, it was a thin client for an extremely underpowered mobile phone with a very outdated operating system.

Ignoring for a moment that the netbook craze was extremely short-lived and largely a placeholder for what people really wanted (sub $500 laptops), no attempt at any of these sorts of companion devices has ever achieved critical mass and Palm was right to cancel a product that wouldn’t have moved the needle. Why Samsung even bothers maintaining DeX mode is beyond me.

Another smart phone pioneer that struggled and was never able to adequately respond to the iPhone did release their own take on the Foleo. It was called the BlackBerry Playbook and it was an absolutely terrible tablet and a colossal failure.

Canceling Foleo in 2007 was prudent. It is a shame the post-Colligan Palm was never able to find success; webOS had many great ideas. But the Palm Foleo was a product that absolutely did not need to exist.

> Why Samsung even bothers maintaining DeX mode is beyond me.

It's not for everyone but for the ones that appreciate it it's a really powerful feature. I work whole days in DeX. I have docks at work, at home, at family where I stay a lot.

Not needing to drag a laptop around is amazing. I have both a personal and work VDI for when I really need it but 95% of the time I just work in Android with DeX.

It's definitely the #1 reason I buy Samsung

I was really looking forward to the foleo actually. Most likely would have purchased one.

These are not stream of conciouness emails. Almost certainly lawyers reviewed or drafted it, or edited it, or suggested edits or he knew how to write a good negotiation email. This ain't necessarily how he talks to his team.

It's not that it was written off the cuff, it's that it holds up nearly 20 years later as a measured, ethical response to having his company threatened. And this email wouldn't even be public if it hadn't been evidence in court proceedings

It is strategic. You can only look at it through that lens. For an ethical measure of a company or exec: see what a company does for the greater good despite it reducing their profit.

It's a shame capitalism doesn't reward any of that, but instead rewards (in the industry he was CEO in) putting product in consumer's hands. He stood on principal and his ultimate reward for that call (in the absence of any regulatory enforcement against what Apple aimed to do here) was iPhone beat out PalmPilots.

Oh well.

On the plus side, looks like he's having some success with what he's doing now.

You make it sound like doing the right thing caused the downfall of Palm but I don't think there's any evidence of that. Being evil doesn't automatically make your products better.

I think the point is that being evil (especially in illegal ways) should be discouraged by society _regardless_ of whether it's successful. The issue isn't that this specific good guy lost, it's that the bad guy faced no repercussions. If this good guy still wouldn't have won, there still could have been a different good guy to come along.

Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel paid a $415M settlement for this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

That is just cost of business. I like the EU approach but the US will never adopt it. Scale the fines up to percentages of global revenue. That would definitely stifle some of these abuses.

In other words, Apple only got a slap on the wrist.

I mean, they did face repercussions.

The DoJ reached settlements with 8 different companies and there was a civil penalty too. Whether the repercussions were enough is a valid question, but Jobs was dead by the time the civil action was ruled on and on medical leave when the DoJ settlement in 2011 took place, so it’s hard to play a “what if” game here — especially since these lawsuits and DoJ investigations (correctly) caused tech companies to have to change their policies.

But Apple’s egregious no-poach agreements and collusion with other companies to do the same didn’t cause Palm’s collapse. And being able to more easily hire Apple employees wouldn’t have saved Palm.

The repercussions Apple faced were essentially insignificant to them as a company. The money they had to pay was a drop in the bucket, and having to stop doing something illegal is not a punishment for the illegal thing; it's literally what everyone who didn't do anything illegal has already been doing the whole time!

As I said before, the issue to me isn't whether Palm would have been successful without the illegal activity, it's whether Apple would have been as successful as they were.

The way he has an impact is over time by praising his response for the next generation.

Steve was wrong, America is better when employees are free.

It'd be cool if the mechanisms by which companies are rewarded and punished reflected that idea.

Steve's company is now one of the three largest in the US. The other one was bought out. The lesson from history seems to be "you can have a little illegal non-compete. As a treat."

There are about a billion other reasons why Apple is so successful today. It really has nothing to do with the illegal non-compete, considering most of its astronomical growth came post-Steve, something most people fail to understand.

Well, one’s customers were his employees and the other was the world.

I suspect his ultimate reward for the call was sticking to his integrity, and knowing that his integrity cannot be compromised by a bully. Some people prefer that to money or fame. Agreed it would be nice if capitalism saw that as a positive and not a hindrance.

Palm... Or "how to blow your lead by wasting half a decade doing nothing".

I _loved_ my Palm Treo 600, that was released 5 freaking years before the first iPhone. It had everything I needed, but the OS felt anachronistic even in 2003.

So I was eagerly awaiting for Palm OS 6 to come, so I could upgrade. And waiting. And waiting. And then Palm died.

Palm didn't have anything to do with Palm OS 6, they spun off Palm OS development to a company called PalmSource (later ACCESS). Palm OS 6 was finished around 2004, but never shipped on a device because the performance was horrible compared to Palm OS 5. This was due to poor software architecture. PalmSource threw out the kernel used by previous versions of Palm OS and replaced it with a microkernel that focused on message-passing between processes. Most of the Palm OS API got re-implemented using IPC. This meant that each API call would require at least two context switches, more if the API implementation needed to make another API call that was implemented with IPC. The ARM chips that were available at that point flushed their caches on each context switch. The result was that doing something like opening an address book with around a thousand entries went from taking a few hundred ms to taking seconds, as displaying each entry required an IPC call to the service responsible for handling contacts data.

It's definitely a shame, as Palm OS 5 is a stopgap OS that got shipped on devices way after the point it became obsolete. Third-party developers couldn't even write native ARM software, they had to compile for 68k and add small chunks of ARM code for performance intensive areas where the 68k->ARM emulation became a bottleneck.

That's interesting. I've read before that it was mostly due to licensing disagreements rather than performance problems.

I'd love to read more about that period.

Palm not having anything to do with PalmOS6 is entirely a problem with Palm.

I was so frustrated. The number of times companies take the lead then sit on their lead until it dies has often bothered me deeply!

The downside to being a passionate customer & engineer.

—

I felt similarly with Netscape. If Navigator had been consistently both web browser and editor, it would have been a better product, a real service in keeping the web a two way tool for most people.

Tim Berners-Lee’s vision tied creation & browsing together, which is why the web happened at all.

Staying true to that would have produced more value, and maintained enough (constructive) lock in for Netscape to keep innovating in a way that mattered.

Instead they announced their imagined threat to Windows, before that threat was realistic, then drowned in Microsoft’s response. And the disparity in their emphasis on browsing vs. creation left a big hole in the side of their boat, leaving them extremely vulnerable to browser competitors.

Microsoft was convicted in court for product tying & other over anti-competitive behavior.

But Netscape was convicted in the market for not fulfilling the full circle value of the web they were pioneering. They commoditized themselves. And the web has never recovered from the unnecessary creation/browsing dichotomy.

I was so mad at them! (Laughing tears emoji)

But...literally part of the explanation is this email and what it represents?

Apple participated in an illegal anti-competitive anti-worker chilling of the market.

If they hadn't, perhaps some of the people that worked on iPhone over the next decade might have joined Palm, and improved it.

Instead, Apple retained them and artificially deflated their wages at the same time.

Don't get me wrong, Palm is still more to blame. But...there's a reason Jobs perpetuated this policy. He knew the value one or two key people can make in changing the entire history of product and technology.

Same. I did really like webos when it was finally released, I got one of those HP touchpad and happily used it. But it was too little, too late.

The landscape of mobile devices shifted from business to consumer, and companies just didnt care enough to start appealing to the new market.

I'm impressed at how principled and unflappable Ed Colligan is in his response to Jobs:

>On the other hand, this is a small space, and it’s inevitable that we will bump into each other. Threatening Palm with a patent lawsuit in response to a decision by one employee to leave Apple is just out of line. A lawsuit would not serve either of our interests, and will not stop employees from migrating between our companies. This is a very exciting time for both of our companies, and the market is certainly big enough for both of us. We should focus on our respective businesses and not create unnecessary distractions.

Compare this to Eric Schmidt's spineless response when Jobs complained to him about Google poaching:

>Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?" Schmidt wrote.

>Google's staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer "will be terminated within the hour."

>He added: "Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs."

Then again, Google thrived afterward and happily enjoyed the fruits of illegally suppressing wages, while Palm's market share plummeted soon after Jobs' threat.

Wasn't Schmidt serving on Apple board board too at that time?

Yet after a massive paper trail, "do not call" lists, and "gentlemen's agreements" with C-level executives between not just Apple and Google but with a large majority of SV in a conspiracy to avoid competition in wages. [1] The only response was a civil class action lawsuit. No jail time.

Oh, but we do get to look at their dirty paper trail.

These people will never learn. Protests haven't done jack shit. Stock market speculators reward their shitty behavior. Government isn't doing their job either due to incompetence, a revolving door policy, or politicians using the threats of DOJ to get billionaire favors/donations.

The only thing I have seen work? A lone gunman with an axe to grind against a corrupt industry, careful planning, a gun, and 3 bullets with a message sent directly to the CEO. In the wake of that aftermath, healthcare industry was shook. Anthem BC/BS withdrew their cap on anesthesia coverage almost immediately. [2] Near unification across the board regarding how bad the state of healthcare is in USA.

I'm fortunate enough to not be impacted, yet. But seeing the increasing disparity between poor/middle class and ultra wealthy is disheartening. We are slowly entering a second gilded age, if not already a reality for some or most people.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753701/no-poach-scandal-...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2024/12/05/nx-s1-5217617/blue-cross-blue...

Thanks for posting the NPR source.

I read about the anesthesia case from VOX, and they claimed the opposite, namely that there would be no additional costs for the patients https://www.vox.com/policy/390031/anthem-blue-cross-blue-shi...

>> illegally suppressing wages

This is spot on - Googlers are notoriously poor.

High wages doesn’t mean they aren’t being suppressed

In fact, the higher the wages the more incentive to suppress, right?

This is the wrong way to look at it.

If the employees of these massive companies who illegally suppressed their wages hadn't done so then the companies wouldn't be so massive, and the employees would have more money and some of them would have had more resources to start competitors to the hypothetically less well moneyed giants.

This would have lead to a scenario where there's more competition in the market which means more innovation, more jobs for other people in tech, and lower prices for consumers.

Unfortunately this didn't happen and we're all worse off for it.

This. This is why companies win.

What do you think happens to YOUR salary if one big company, or ideally many big companies, have to pay very high salaries?

I'll give you time to study basic micro economics (supply and demand).

Context: Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt at Google, and several other high ranking tech execs conspired to illegally fix wages lower by agreeing to not hire each others’ staff.

Billions of dollars were thus stolen from staff by these companies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...

> In June 2014, Judge Lucy Koh expressed concern that the settlement would not be a good one for the plaintiffs. Michael Devine, one of the plaintiffs, said the settlement was unjust. In a letter he wrote to the judge he said the settlement represented only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000 workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded.

The companies got off with barely a slap on the wrist.

The thing that strikes me is the disparity in length. I think a lot of people don’t realize how hard it is to write succinctly. Jobs was (is?) probably under-appreciated as a writer.

Colligan was correct such an agreement would be illegal and could have just stood on that.

Colligan was putting down what had occurred in writing so that the details of what Jobs had said would be a matter of record should it come to a lawsuit down the line.

This is a common - and highly useful - strategy if you've just been in a meeting where things have been said that you were uncomfortable with.

Being succinct would have defeated the purpose.

This is a useful strategy to employ in all kinds of situations. A dated note written shortly after the event is going to carry more weight than recollection later. An e-mail sent to the other party that they have not contested the understanding of is going to carry more weight than just a note.

And if, as Jobs did, your other side responds, you now have ammunition for any future lawsuits.

EDIT: Creating a paper trail is a method to take note of in other contexts too. Your manager at work asked you to do something unethical? Summarise your understanding of the conversation in writing and ask if you understood it correctly (a lot of the time, the request will magically become a misunderstanding).

Jobs tries to bully and threaten a smaller company into signing an illegal agreement and all you have to say is how great of a writer he is because of how few sentences he wrote?

Seriously

Did we read the same emails? The Jobs email felt like a toddler's emotional response, whereas Ed's was thoughtful, considered, while still sufficiently short and to the point.

Ed’s was way too long for the job it needed to do.

I’m pretty sure these emails are public for exactly that reason.

This crap happens all the time between companies.

When I worked at Apple around 1990, Steve who was as we all know was CEO of NeXT at the time was recruiting 6 Apple folks (including me) to help add the internationalization infrastructure to NeXT OS. We were invited to dinner at his Woodside home (the one where the Ducati motorcycle was parked inside at the bottom of the stairs which I can confirm to be true.)

The first thing, after we sat down for dinner, is Steve read us a letter that the Apple Lawyers sent him threatening to sue for poaching employees. He then sat down and we had a wonderful vegetarian meal prepared by his two ex. ahead Panisse chefs.

What was memorable about the meal was that Steve was still very emotionally attached to Apple and most of dinner was him asking us about Apple.

None of us took him up on the Job offer and I letter learn that the Apple lawyers found out about the meeting before hand because one of us (who I’ll kept nameless) alerted them about the meeting.

A decade or so later I worked at Intuit where Intuit, Adobe, Apple, Google, Pixar (and one or two other companies that escape me) had an anti-poaching agreement not to approach anyone for a job (if they however we approached by someone they would consider them.) All the companies were later fined (I think it was a court case) and employees between certain years at those companies who were looking for jobs got a significant settlement.

I missed the date of qualifying for the settlement by one year but I know for a fact that this was indeed true because as a hiring manager at Intuit HR more than one time told me I could not cold call people at these companies to recruit.

As another aside to this story, when I was at Intuit Bill Campbell who was on the Apple Board and CEO/Board Member of Intuit in 1999 or 2000 arranged for my project (An entirely internet version of Quickbooks as a subscription service) to support the then crappy Macintosh Microsoft IE browser that was the main Mac browser.

You have to remember that Microsoft IE on the Mac was a completely different code base than on windows, did not have any debugging, and not feature compatible especially as far as CSS and DOM functionality is concerned. So we did meet with Apple but told them that we could not support what they wanted unless we could get a debugger for that Mac IE at a minimum. The response from them was just to debug on IE in windows. We laughed and left the meeting.

I think Apple got that response from a lot of early web app developers and was a factor into them taken control of their browser destiny and eventually releasing Safari.

By the way, although I left Intuit in 2007, our product is the version of Quickbooks that they mainly sell, and is supported by all the modern browsers but in 1999 when the project was started developing a complex easy to use web app was a challenge.

It was an insignificant settlement. This agreement was in place at the start of the mobile wars. Apple spent a lot of money suing its competitors instead of spending that money paying engineers to leave its competitors. Immediately following the ruling against the companies, salaries shot up industry-wide, by far more per year than each engineer got from the settlement for multiple years of illegal activity.

Still have fond memories of my Palm V. Was outstanding at the time.

Keep in mind this was 2007 -- my hunch is it sounds like it probably was really about iOS vs webOS, not Apple vs Palm (Pilot/Foleo/PalmOS). Android wasn't even out when the email was sent, and I know webOS didn't come out to the public until 2009, but I am rather curious how long it was in development prior-to...

I was a webOS dude -- I still have a Palm Pre 1, 2 and 3 in a box. I tried to explain to my hipster doofus buddy at the time why I fucked with the Palm vision over the Apple vision (regrettably, in hindsight, part of it was due to Palm holding onto the physical keyboard, part of which was I was a huge fan of that due to entering the smartphone era after being a previous T-Mobile Sidekick 1 - 3 user) -- they both preached the same philosophy of web apps over native apps, except something intangible and aesthetic about the Pre resonated with me in late 00's more than iPhone did.

Apple also hadn't yet started deploying most of its critical infrastructure (walled-garden interoperability, APNS, any of that stuff) that lead to eventual dominance and ended up justifying the current stock price / mobile supremacy -- it was just a phone vs phone comparison.

These days, IMO, Apple is on top of the pile. They're launching satellites that likely will completely sidestep mobile carriers in the short term. They're doing stuff with hardware that today we think is stupid, but tomorrow might just be an accepted part of life. They've made it easy for anybody to lock their digital lives inside of the Apple vaults for a recurring monthly subscription lol.

I can't say any of that speaks to the 90's dream of an open internet, but they sure do seem to have a clear-cut plan and are quite good at executing it!

> These days, IMO, Apple is on top of the pile. They're launching satellites that likely will completely sidestep mobile carriers in the short term.

Satellite won't take over land-based mobile connectivity. The density and in-building coverage just isn't there. No matter how many sats you launch. There's only small windows of radio spectrum that work well for sats and the signal is spread out over too wide an area. You just can't get enough bandwidth to serve all iPhone users in populated areas.

It's great for backup purposes and sparse areas but it's not going to replace mobile networks.

What would have happened had Jobs followed through with his threat and arranged to have Apple sue Palm? All this stuff would have entered the record, right?

Palm would have countersued with its superior mobile patents. I'm sure Apple's attorneys pointed this out to Jobs when he went to them after this exchange, which is why he didn't follow through.

These emails entered the record following discovery in the wage suppression lawsuits.

I'm just curious if the illegal attempt to coerce Palm would have been a factor in the case.

These are some of the richest people debating whether to stop people from seeking to work elsewhere. Absolutely despicable. Hat's off to Palm for seeking the reasonably route.

Lot of comments observing that Apple is doing much better than Palm these days, but IMO they miss the point.

Steve is dead, and I don’t think he got to take any of that victory money with him.

Palm is dead too, but its investors and employees are doing something else now, and I don’t think they’re generally much worse for the wear. And the time that Palm’s engineers spent there is indelibly better because their boss respected them. On the other hand, I don’t know how many Apple employees got to retire early because of Steve’s management, but I’m not sure their lives, including their time working for Steve, are better overall.

Life is a journey, not a destination.

Totally fair and balanced response. I'd much rather works have liked to work for him than for Apple. Of course they didn't do very well in the end but I like this respectful attitude.

"Inside Macintosh" disciples would enjoy PalmOS app development.

Clearly the "Classic" Mac API was an inspiration. In a good way.

It was simple and fun.

By 2007, though, the world had changed.

I think the best description I have ever heard of Jobs was given by Bill Burr: "Jesus, Ghandi, John Lennon, ME!". Much like Lennon, he cultivated a whole peace/love/enlightenment image while being a garbage person. Lennon for example, beat the shit out of his first wife, abandoned his first son Julian, and then made sure they got no money from him. Sound familiar? Yeah Jobs did very much the same to his first wife and daughter (well, I am not sure if he physically abused his wife but still..).

I think you can make the argument that what Jobs brought to the table was impeccable taste. He was very good at pushing (some would say abusing) his people to make things that people genuinely loved. I think that design sense is notably absent in today's crop of tech CEO's. Again Burr nails it: "I want my entire album collection in this phone. GET ON IT!!"

Kinda tells you what an asshole Steve Jobs was.

  https://xcancel.com/TechEmails/status/1868368310024462791

"Palm now owns the former Siemens mobile patent portfolio"

Man, I miss Siemens phones, they were great at the time. I wonder what they would be like today if Siemens didn't quit the market.

Great email by Palm CEO. Very adult and levelheaded. Something we all expect and deserve from anyone that makes it to the CEO level. Unfortunately, it has been rare and even more so lately.

You will never be able to avoid the type of people that only care about the most money they can make. These people don’t care about the product, the mission, or the company. They will bounce from Apple to Palm and then somewhere else. Totally fine. I hope they are doing the level of work and have the level of skill that warrants their pay, if only for the sake of their colleagues that have to put up with them. I don’t have any sympathy for companies or people at the top of those companies that hire dipshits that can’t produce anything and still pay them unnecessary money.

Obviously, we hope companies pay employees that have passion for the mission and treat them fairly. Then they have a reason to stay. Unfortunately, a lot of these employees fall through the cracks and it’s a shame. If they jump to another company then finding out why is a good thing to focus on.

This spells out in black and white that Jobs was a pretty shameless crook. We already knew this based on Apple and its peers getting caught colluding to wage fix, and the settlement that came from this, but this is a great reminder.

I really feel like Jobs gets too much credit. He was smart, but he also rode on the shoulders of multiple giants in his career, and he got lucky several times. The cult of Jobs was convinced that Apple would go downhill in his absence, but the company has quantifiably done wildly better since Cook took over.

I feel like there is a strong tendency to average out people’s contributions.

Your comment is on the milder scale, so this is only tangentially a response to you.

—

With highly related choices, it can make sense to add & cancel moral choices. Good & bad behavior are like positives & negatives.

But life and incidents are not simple sums. Relations between choices & their outcomes are highly nonlinear. They can have thresholds, be multiplicative, exponential, roots or logarithmic relations.

Choices & their outcomes rarely simply add or cancel.

Jobs was an incredibly prolific innovator whose personal characteristics often translated to important advances in the quality of computing, independent of the general industry’s shared march of compounding quantity/efficiency of computing.

No amount of moral lapses not on that scale cancel any of that.

At the same time, his positive contributions, no matter how large, don’t cancel out his poor behaviors.

Like a polynomial, or more complicated algebraic or calculus expressions, it takes several “numbers” to characterize human being’s contributions.

—

The worst cases of overly reductive thinking happen in politics. The prevalence of judging people and peoples’ behaviors as simply net positive or negative, and their opponents as simply the other sign is endemic.

The result creates hard high-contrast divisions in ideologies & loyalties that don’t reflect reality much at all.

But over reduction also appears to be a common reflex when judging innovators.

> shameless crook

Over a decade after his death, there is plenty of observable, egregious shamelessness and brigandry in the world. Jobs was a successful player in a big, bruising corporate world.

Jobs was ruthless in business and cruel in some personal relationships. But he had skills and talent too. Apple wouldn't exist today without his leadership through a critical juncture. He was also a driving force for usability in products.

Notice how no one seems to promote usability anymore. (We do however pay lip-service to sustainability.)

I never liked the cult of idolatry that developed around the person. Comedian Bill Burr offers the best excoriation of that phenemonon. [0]

"New phone can't fit the old charger? This is your hero?!"

[0] _ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3s-qZsjK8I

> Notice how no one seems to promote usability anymore.

The million UX designers in the world right now: "What?"

We are now in the midst of a multi-year, industry wide wage fixing effort. I hope people speak with as much fervor about the CEOs currently trying to suppress wages as they do about Jobs.

I'm not from SV, but are you talking about the companies from down there? And if yes, I suppose it includes some of the FAANGs.

This difference this time is that they learned their lesson. Not the lesson of not engaging in corrupt business practices, but not to get caught: there's likely a Signal group chat they use with burner phones. Arguably the best piece of evidence against Jobs mental acuity was the fact that he just openly engaging in a criminal conspiracy using the company's email servers.

> the company has quantifiably done wildly better since Cook took over

How much of that is because the company moved along the winning trajectory already set by Steve Jobs?

I agree on the premise of Jobs being overrated, Apple was the classic right spot right time company and that is not to say he was not a good leader in that situation but that _is_ to say that Apple could just as well have succeeded under a different leader with different antics.

Who would it have succeeded as well with? Because they tried hiring a few CEOs, and far from succeeding, they were very nearly bankrupt. After bringing him back, they worked their way to being the most valuable public company. He's one of the clearest examples of the value of a good CEO.

We remember the comeback, but we forget that he was kicked out of the company because he nearly ran it into the ground when he was in charge the first time. You can't put all the blame on the CEOs who followed him for failing to clean up the mess he created in the first place any more than you can give him all the credit for the company's performance long after he departed.

Furthermore, he was only brought back with a turnaround plan that was created up in no small part by his financial backers, and the C-suite he arrived with included Tim Cook. I'm convinced Cook's housecleaning on their supply chain and product lines was what actually saved the company. They might've delayed bankruptcy with a hit like the iMac, but only for a short while.

> the C-suite he arrived with included Tim Cook.

Untrue - Cook was hired from HP in March of 1998. Jobs was interim CEO of Apple from February of 1997.

I stand corrected. Still, he was on the turnaround team very early on.

Yeah, my understanding is that that was one of the most impactful things Jobs did, aggressively clean house and recruit/promote a good leadership team. And they trimmed the product offerings, killed off the clone program, and a bunch of other stuff to improve their focus.

It sure takes an awful lot of hard work to be in the right place at the right time. Foolish, both of you.

Vision matters and Jobs had one. If it were all just meaningless fate, really there’s no reason to get out of bed or even comment on HN.

> The cult of Jobs was convinced that Apple would go downhill in his absence

This claim is about as useful as saying "All HN users think X."

who hasn't ridden on shoulders of giants

but the company has quantifiably done wildly better since Cook took over.

due to all the stuff mr. jobs had done.

Thoughts and prayers to the 3 people (referenced in the letter) who left Apple to work at Palm in 2007.

I don't think they need any of your prayers, they're likely better than all of us combined and better than any person who joined Apple later.

Jobs was evidently pissed to lose those 3 people, so it’s safe to assume they were very senior folk. They likely were involved in the iPhone design to trigger this CEO panic

Imagine having vested stock before the release of the iPhone. Imagine getting paid a top dollar package to take your experience to a competitor.

Those three people made out like bandits. One could only wish to be in their shoes.

They made the best decision based on the information they had at the time. No need to mock someone based on that.

Given the rest of the exchange between Steve and Colligan, they might have needed to leave for other reasons too.

How much mockery would you trade to get some 2007 Apple RSOs?

Everyone wins when they have the benefit of hindsight.

I wasn't trying to mock them - just a light-hearted joke.

So you were mocking them.

No need for thoughts and prayers, if they worked at Apple as engineers at that time and weren't dumb enough to sell their shares they are likely multi-millionaires at this point.

Well.. history tells that people usually sell shares too early. It’s hard to not sell if they increased a lot in value.

You know Steve was right when Palm doesn't exist anymore now

And being thoughtful and considerate got Palm nowhere, while Apple has now the largest market cap ever.

maybe it's less the diplomacy and more that they were sitting on a pile of crusty patents instead of building the iphone

I think it’s easy to forget the palm pre and webos because it wasn’t a competitor for very long, but to be blunt, it was the only decent competitor to the iPhone but in the 2008/2009 timeframe. Android was awful on launch, blackberry was completely behind, Microsoft had a plan that was decent but was too late. Palm really was the only real threat in the early days. They just didn’t have the money to iterate like apple (and Google).

They also, unfortunately, ran into hardware issues. They were exploring the novel battery form-factor and storage space when lithium chemistry was even less understood than it is now; they had a sequence of models with batteries that went EOL too quickly, enough to (at best) make them seen as unreliable in the consumer space and (at worst) seen as trying to put people on an upgrade treadmill (back when that was a bad thing, before people understood that would actually be Apple's whole model with iPhones).

As someone who was part of the developer community and had multiple of the prototype devices, both phone and tablet, I can say it’s not because of the software they lost to Apple, it’s because of the hardware. The hardware was plain inferior, even for the era.

I think the critical miss of that era was Research in motion not buying palm. I think that combination could have had a real shot of staying relevant. Rim basically already made hardware that would have worked and had tons of corporate support because of blackberry messenger. The patents between the two would have also been quite strong.

There was almost a tablet as well, I think it got pulled just before launch, and the inventory got sold off for next to nothing.

I'm pretty sure a tablet was released, then scrapped sometime in the first month or so after release - TouchPad, IIRC? It got no support from HP or Palm. I seem to remember a quote from some exec saying something like "the market demands a $499 tablet" or something like that, and TouchPads weren't selling. But when they were discounted to $99 - $149, they sold out instantly. They even did a second production run and sold more at $249.

This was a huge missed opportunity for Palm. WebOS was pretty good at that time. They needed more software for it - this is a perpetual problem for most platforms at launch. Seed the market with good hardware, invest in developers, and let it churn for more than 2 months before killing the whole thing.

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

My memory was that it was released and then two weeks cancelled when HP decided to close down Palm and sell off WebOS. I worked for a short time (6 months) working on the tablet setup experience.

And yes, then they were being dumped at fire sell prices of $99/149$ depending up the configuration.

They absolutely were. It was the most hackable tablet for many years because of how cheaply HP dumped these devices on the market.

I loved my Palm Pixi.

ipod / imacs were key to the turnaround, although yes iPhone was a second stage booster.

They pretty much got Sherlocked.

Apple, like many companies, almost died multiple times. I think their success is deserved.

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