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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

Yes "very good", until Apple decides to mass-layoff them, because now, owning the valuable core IP and having killed their primary competitor in the field, Apple can do whatever they want and get away with it because those employees have nowhere else to go in the area. 200+ IQ move </slow_clap>.

How people on HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of competition is beyond me, since in the end it always bites them in the ass (see recent mass layoffs in the industry), yet this lesson seems to be quickly forgotten.

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Lamego only stayed at Apple six months. He was very productive. He filed 12 new patents for Apple. But he apparently had disputes with managers. The details aren't entirely clear. But Lamego ended up resigning. After leaving Apple, he founded his own company, True Wearables, which was also successfully sued by Masimo for trade secret theft.

> owning the valuable core IP and having killed their primary competitor in the field, Apple can do whatever they want

Massimo still owns the core IP. Apple owns some other IP.

> How people on HN can support monopolization of markets

There was one niche (note: still massive) provider of this technology. Now there are two, one of which is mass. Even if that collapses to one mass, that’s objectively better. More competitors and more consumer surplus is not a monopoly condition.

There is a difference between being reflexively anti-Apple regardless of the circumstances and being pro-monopoly.

Masimo does so much more than consumer-worn heart rate monitors and O2 sensors. They'll be fine as well.

They will be fine, but maybe they want to be FANG rich. You do not get there if the already big companies play by different rules and can out spend the minute you pose a threat.

Maybe if Masimo had made Lamego a significant shareholder, he wouldn't have left his "CTO" role to become a mere Apple employee. Masimo is an $8b company. They created a spinoff called Cercacor which Lamego got to be CTO of. My best guess is it wasn't a real startup like we're used to in the Silicon Valley sense. There wasn't any real opportunity for him to gain generational wealth there if he was successful. Apple not only hired him, but thirty other of their employees too, because Apple recognized that their talent was worth more than a licensing deal. That's the issue with these non-valley enterprises. They're very feudal in the sense that the owners treat their engineers and scientists like ordinary workers, expect total loyalty, and pull out their legal guns when they don't get their way. Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals. A court later found Lamego hadn't made his moves entirely fairly, but I believe if you look at the big picture, Apple's behavior wasn't predatory, but rather liberatory.

> Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals.

It’s mindblowing how big of a gap this is for these non-tech companies. I work for a company that sold to PE. The owners walked away with the vast majority of a 1.5 billion deal.

I asked if employees were given anything. “Sure. Some got as much as 50k!” I was told.

Using some standard equity math for early engineers, I back of napkined that the 25 year tenure engineers, if they were at big tech, should have gotten low 7 figures. Nope. They got 50k out of 1.5 billion.

(No, PE had no say on how that 1.5 billion was divided up for those of you quick to blame PE.)

Yeah tech startups are great like that. Big tech companies are even better. With them, you don't have to wait for a successful exit, or even work there that long, to get your low seven figures. No one in America is working harder to restore the middle class than the tech industry. Even the person who cleans my house makes more than 50k. Meanwhile legacy enterprises and private equity are doing everything in their power to destroy it. This is a moral righteous struggle for the heart of America, which makes it such a shame that Lamego was found by the courts to have acted dishonorably, but we mustn't forget who's side we're on.

They're already in most of the hospitals in America. There was one attached to my daughter's foot for 100+ days. I don't think they care about FAANG at all. They're not a software company. Look them up - this is big companies fighting, not David and Goliath.

>Look them up - this is big companies fighting, not David and Goliath.

Massimo is 400x smaller than Apple. WTF are you talking about like they're in the same weight class?

> maybe they want to be FANG rich

Their (limited) levels.fyi data does not indicate this is one of their goals.

Is there evidence of Apple doing this in the past?

Apple is infamous for driving other companies into bankruptcy to acquire their assets. For a single example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_Technology

That’s not evidence of Apple doing mass layoffs, though.

How is that an example of Apple driving a company into bankruptcy to acquire their assets? Judging from the Wikipedia article, it looks like Exponential Technologies made a good PowerPC CPU, but Motorola promised they'd be able to catch up, and it's safer to bet on a big company that you've been doing business with than to rely on a startup for a critical component.

Licensed Mac clones were only available for two years (1995-1997), and discontinuing the program drove many other companies out of business, so it's hard to see how the change was a ploy to acquire a single company's assets. It seems more likely that Jobs discontinued licensing because it caused Apple to lose money.

And it looks like much of the Exponential Technologies team continued under a different name, then was bought by Apple in 2010 for $121 million.[1]

If there are other examples, can you provide one that is more recent and/or more blatant?

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/technology/28apple.html

When they started, they were producing for multiple small customers. Apple was frustrated with Motorola and approached them but demanded they massively increase their production capacity (Apple's model for dominating a supplier... put them in debt and beholden to them for orders) and effectively dominated them as a customer...

Then used them to negotiate a better price with Motorola, dumped their purchase contract for 'reasons' and bankrupted the company.

Exponential sued.. and won $500 million... for breach contract but were destroyed by that point. Apple gobbled up their IP for around $20 mil later on.

Oh... and I forgot this case also exposed that Apple had embedded proprietary IP into the CPU design which made it impossible to seel the already produced CPUs to anyone else (PowerPC chips were in very high demand at the time and these were the fastest on the market).

I can't find any articles about Exponential winning the lawsuit, only that they filed one and sought $500 million in damages. Had they won, I think it would have been in the press. The only thing I could find was Apple's 10K from 1999[1], which says they settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount:

> This matter was settled during the fourth quarter of 1999 for an amount not material to the Company's financial position or results of operations.

If Apple did pay $500 million, I think that would have been material to the company's financial position, as their profit that year was $601M.

Again, are there any examples that are less debatable and/or more recent? I don't have a dog in this fight. But if Apple is infamous for this behavior, it seems like there would be stronger examples.

1. See page 59: https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...

I have not found the records online (a lawyer can probably find it) but I was involved with some of the people in 1997/1998. There were multiple lawsuits going for years as Apple held 5% ownership.

The original team ended up founding Intrinsity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity) and being involed with the Samsung A8 and Apple A4 designs. Apple ended up buying the company and many of those people are the ones designing their current chips. (https://touchreviews.net/apple-intrinsity-implications/)

>Apple can do whatever they want and get away with it because those employees have nowhere else to go in the area. 200+ IQ move.

I would bet Apple, and the other large publicly listed tech companies, have lifted far more employees into financial independence from employers than any other business in history.

> have lifted far more employees into financial independence

They've also destroyed financial independence. They've engaged in anti-competitive and anti-poaching practices before. There's several famous examples.

Anyways, are you saying it's Apple's goal to lift employees in this way, or does it just happen to be incidental to whatever their CEO wants at the moment?

Also all the people actually _making_ those devices, surely the largest labor pool supporting their business, have zero financial independence. That's the typical western blind spot.

> from employers than any other business in history

I think that'd be the US Government and it's GI Bill. Okay, technically not a business, but if the virtue is independence, then it shouldn't matter who provided it.

>I would bet Apple, and the other large publicly listed tech companies, have lifted far more employees into financial independence from employers than any other business in history.

So doing monopolistic and illegal things is OK because it makes some people rich?

Let's not forget Masimo picked the fight. Apple was fine letting them compete.

Pardon? Masimo was first and Apple took their tech (as confirmed by a court). Was Masimo supposed to sit there and shrug?

Hah, plenty of people have described Masimo, 400 times smaller than Apple, in the threads on this as "bullying Apple unfairly by being a patent troll."

If they couldn't get a patent on the LED setup, just the software, then yes. They should just shrug and compete. The idea of a piece of software should always be open to competition.

First to what? Sensor was invented in 1972.

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