I wonder if Mr. Colligan actually felt that way and was that principled/articulate, or if he either knew it was illegal or ran it by his lawyers to take the high ground in a letter which they thought would likely become public/discoverable later.
If they've had off the record phone communication about the subject, the decision to follow that up with an email is a calculated decision. If he had decided to participate in the recruitment embargo, it certainly would not have been acknowledged in an email for all the discovery reasons that make this a compelling PR piece.
On the flip side, Steve Jobs comes off as being completely ignorant that this is discoverable. I don't know why he'd include threats in an email like this.
Not so sure. For the companies that did participate (Google, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm), there seem to have ben plenty of written documents circulating, including "do not call lists" of competitor's employees that HR was not allowed to contact.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/damning-evidence-emerges-in...
This entire document seems like it was crafted to make Colligan look virtuous, and maybe he was, but if so, it was because his lawyers told him that it would be to his benefit.
Note that this document references a phone call that happened first, this call was totally undocumented and points to the fact that both sides were feeling each other out to seek a benefit, when it was clear that Palm held the poor hand, they started crafting a defense.