Steve Jobs threatened Palm’s CEO, court documents reveal | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs threatened Palm’s CEO, court documents reveal

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166 pointskome113 comments

Every month "admiring Steve Jobs" becomes a stronger heuristic for me on whom to ignore and/or avoid.

Not only was he a sociopath who hurt others (read his biography) but he was clearly also a deeply unethical business leader not to be emulated (read this fiasco and also the latter parts of his biography).

He held some great humane design principles (read about them from Jef Raskin and Larry Tesler etc who came up with and heralded them) and was able to get tough projects through (like many leaders) of course. But I am afraid that is not what people admire in him.

It is possible to admire someone without thinking they're flawless; or, perhaps, to admire certain traits/aspects of someone without admiring them altogether.

Michael Jordan was the greatest athlete of his time but an absolute asshole.

Martin Luther King had an affair (multiple? I forget.)

Musicians in general seem like pretty terrible people, with many notable exceptions.

I think the distinction GP is trying to make is in this sentence:

> he was clearly also a deeply unethical business leader not to be emulated

MLK's affair has nothing to do with his contributions to the civil rights movement, the latter being the reason that (some) people admire him.

But GP is claiming that the very accomplishment for which (some) people admire Steve Jobs (his success) was obtained via unethical means that should not be admired.

I think it cuts both ways. People can choose not admire MLK just because of his flaws, regardless if they had anything to deal with his contributions to the civil rights movement. J Cole has a song that talks about this somewhat[0], first two lines in verse one sums this situation up nicely (and applies to Jobs too)…

Also, some people may choose to admire Jobs because of how he did whatever took to reach his goals regardless of ethics involved.

Evidently when Jobs was alive, he did what he did despite what people thought of him.

[0] http://rapgenius.com/J-cole-she-knows-lyrics

Correct. I think that people who go through unethical means to achieve their goals are to be avoided. I worry that people admire specifically the unethical aspects of Steve Jobs' leadership, which is why I declared my heuristic.

I see it different: there are a lot of people doing [relatively] unethical things all the time while preaching about ethics to business wannabes. It's not only about Steve Jobs.

They aren't revered near unto godhead

You need to get to know more musicians. 'Musician' in this context is synonymous with 'person'. There isn't a 'musician' personality.

I believe the parent means, basically, "rock stars" (or "pop stars"/"country stars"/"rap stars"/whatever), the Locutus-like avatars of the music-industry, who are given songs written by the producer's songwriter and told that they're "theirs."

I think Japan is a lot more honest about this, in that these people are just called "idols" and aren't expected to originate any sort of authentic thought or message; they're just transparently icons in the employ of greater corporate forces, who go on talk-shows, and get talked about by paparazzi... and sometimes perform music.

Incredibly even in 2014 "musician" still has a negative connotation among some socially conservative people.

The US music-products trade organization doesn't even use the phrase "musician" -- it uses "music makers". Try to find the word "musician" on http://www.namm.org/about

What an amazingly awful website.

Your comment does not address mine. I pointed out why admiring Steve Jobs is an indicator of someone to avoid, not that I was upset Steve Jobs was not flawless.

That you use MLK to defend Steve Jobs troubles me.

I inferred from your comment that you think people who idolize Jobs should be avoided because he has strong negative personality traits/flaws/etc. I'm addressing that most people -- which include those who are famous and have achieved significant things -- have flaws.

I don't see how I'm defending Jobs. I certainly don't think he's a particularly good person, though I admire his achievements.

Admiring achievements via unethical means is like admiring a drug cartel leader for his ability to turn a profit...

There is admiring someone's work and there is admiring the person. I can admire the iPod as a revolutionary product (the one that changed the industry where others could not), without admiring anything in particular about Jobs.

What was wrong with MJ?

>Martin Luther King had an affair (multiple? I forget.)

And why is "having an affair" a character flaw? Because christianity?

it's because you broke a promise you made to someone. breaking promises is generally considered bad/flawed.

It's a silly promise in the first place, which perhaps is why it's one of the most broken ones by billions of people.

> It is possible to admire someone without thinking they're flawless; or, perhaps, to admire certain traits/aspects of someone without admiring them altogether.

The problem with the Steve Jobs "legend" is that it is told in such a biased way that many people believe that:

  - he was a Genius
  - he succeeded against the odds
  - Poor Apple was copied by competitors after inventing everything, and had to resort to patents to defend themselves. *(Miserables music playing in background)*

Well, the actual story is pretty much completely different, Jobs was an aggressive shark who did not care about sucking the blood of people and unethical business practices, Apple mostly did not invent anything new at all and while they were certainly copied they copied as much themselves as the others.

Therefore I'm not sure if there is anything much to admire of Jobs once you remove the layers of lies surrounding his story.

There are many more hackers who would deserve their story to be told rather than him.

And if you're a big fan of apple, Steve Wosniak would be the guy to admire.

Agree.

I really dislike Apple, but admire Wosniak.

"But I am afraid that is not what people admire in him."

Citation? Most of the Apple-centric bloggers I read admire Jobs for the company that he created, not for the way he got there. Perhaps you're mistaking admiration with fascination: a lot of famous people are ruthless, but it's rare for that ruthlessness to be directed towards something other than money or power. Jobs's life is full of unbelievable stories, and people talk about them because it's fun, not because they think they're a good example of how to run a business.

> Citation?

You should probably delete that part. It is moronic to ask for a citation of an opinion. Your point is otherwise interesting.

First, don't be immature.

Second, "that is not what people admire in him" is not an opinion. It's a statement of fact. Fortunately, the internet is effectively a giant paper trail, so whether or not that statement is true, finding evidence of people's opinions should be a no-brainer -- especially if you consider certain high-profile bloggers to be representative of the general zeitgeist.

Quit yer passive-agressive downvoting and talk to me, you cowards. ;)

To admire someone for where they are and not how they got there* is something that troubles me and what makes me want to think the person is either 1) useless and to be ignored or 2) unethical and to be avoided, like I said.

*Or worse yet, to admire someone for where they are knowing that they got there through unethical means, which is the case with SJ.

Plenty of people around here admire Bill Gates for his charity work, despite the fact that he also has blood on his hands. At what point do a person's accomplishments supersede their sins? For some people, creating a company like Apple is enough.

Personally, I try to avoid black-and-white assessments of people, even if I vehemently disagree with them. I used to be an all-out Windows guy, but I started reading Apple bloggers because they had some of the most insightful and intelligent commentary on the state of the computer industry, product design, and programming. If you choose to ignore them just because they might have praise for someone you hate, you're only hurting yourself.

I once met the ex-CEO of Orcon (a major NZ ISP) who had a near mythical view of Steve Jobs. The way he spoke of him made me realise that humans instinctively apply concepts to shape their world view, even if the concepts aren't made for it. There's nothing wrong with that. The CEO wasn't emulating the bad behaviour of Steve Jobs, simply the attention to details, customer focused traits that made his business successful.

To me it doesn't matter who someone admires. It's what they take from it that matters.

Also you can dig up endless dirt on the successful. As a rule of thumb anyone who's remotely very successful has exploited unethical behaviour some point in their life. You can do that with anyone really.

Ryan White's Mother, Ghandi, Mother Teresa,

Mother Teresa told Africans condoms were evil. Gandhi was a racist.

"We were then marched off to a prison intended for Kaffirs. We could understand not being classed with whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized -- the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals." - Ghandi

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/irene-monroe/the-gandhi-none-o...

Gandhi was a lawyer (barrister) trained in English tradition. He was treated as 'part of the ruling class' in India. It is only when he reached Africa that he saw his real place among British who he was raised to admire and copy, and the treacherous ways British ruled India. His statement quoted above comes from his transition period.

It is Gandhi the old, not Gandhi the young, who is respected. No one is born a Mahatma. Except may be Jesus :)

Gandhi also mistreated his wife, neglected his children enough to scar them for life, and used emotional blackmail to get what he wanted from the British and the masses. He kept many beliefs a secret from the people which are coming to light of late. I cannot figure out why we admire Gandhi or call him a mahatma? Non-violence? No he used to beat up his wife and encouraged Indians to get beaten up by the British. We did not get independence because of him- it would have happened any way -given that India was becoming a liability to the British.

He is called Mahatma because people called him so. Those people and their children are dead along with him so it is easy to dig-up dirt on him. I read a great quote somewhere - 'nobody becomes a leader without doing questionable things'. I firmly believe it to be true for Gandhi and MLK and Jesus, but that doesn't steal away the fact that he was indeed a great leader of Indians and the whole world looked up to him for non-violence.

Regarding him being a wife-beater, I want to know your sources. I know for a fact that RSS propagates a lot of lies about Gandhi and Nehru family. I firmly believe he practiced non-violence and was NOT a wife-beater, WAS against caste-system, WAS against British rule over India. His secrets that are coming to light now (such as his sexual deviations) are things that were public when he was alive but almost nobody cared, or cared enough to propagate. Today, his legacy is major political problem for India and so it is being dug-up by some, while others want to hide it.

Whether he was responsible of India's independence or not, I don't know if it can be debated after 70 years of the fact. And I don't think one will ever get to the 'facts' by debating on this point. The maximum one can do is to read more and form informed opinions.

On-topic, while I agree that 'you can dig up endless dirt on the successful', the topic here is not the dirt, it is the person himself. Gandhi didn't become Mahatma because he was a 'racist' or 'wife-beater' etc. But Steve Job became successful due in large part to him being an asshole.

This. I noticed a strong correlation between people I strongly dislike and people that idolize Jobs. Moreover, I found that people that idolize him (not his work) seem to do so because somehow him being good at what he did justified how he treated those around him. I guess these people see themselves as similar to him so they hope that by being good they can excuse being horrible to those around them.

Personally I feel somewhat similar to you, but I find it important to point out that I am discussing the way I filter dangerous/useless people out of my professional life and not why like/dislike individuals.

An important distinction indeed. I stand by what I said: I find people who admire Steve Jobs the person for anecdotes like the one about throwing the iPad prototype into a fish tank to have similar qualities of hubris and arrogance which I personally dislike. In a way I am of the opposite view: I will do business with them and hold my opinion to myself. For me it is a distinction between who I would have a drink with after hours vs n avoid in social situations.

I wouldn't consider the non-poaching agreement unethical... Not in the least. (though such a statement won't be popular here for obvious reasons!)

Nor is threatening other companies with legal action...

Anti-poaching agreements are deceitful and manipulative against employees. They harm many for the benefit of the few. Would you mind explaining how you find that ethically acceptable?

What would you find unethical? Surely there's a line somewhere.

No, such agreements needn't be deceitful nor manipulative. "No poach" agreements don't preclude me, as an employee, from leaving one firm and moving to another - they only preclude the partner firms from actively seeking out one another's employees.

If an "extreme no poach" agreement does, however, limit my future choices, then such information should be disclosed to me prior to employment. Even this more extreme form isn't inherently deceitful if disclosed. If not disclosed, then it would be unethical.

Note that California (and likely US Federal) law makes no poach agreements of any form illegal, thus making disclosure quite tricky. Of course, their illegality also makes it much easier for partner firms to cheat.

Thus, under the circumstances, the "soft no poach" agreement would be ethical: It requires no employee disclosure to remain ethical. The "extreme no poach" agreement, however, can not be rendered ethical in the current legal environment.

>"No poach" agreements don't preclude me, as an employee, from leaving one firm and moving to another - they only preclude the partner firms from actively seeking out one another's employees.

In reality, the no-poach agreements Jobs and others held expressly forbid firms from hiring the other's employees even if the position was sought solely by the employee herself.

Well there you go.

They're illegal. Completely unethical. It's not popular because it's flat out wrong, and hurts everyone working for those companies & our entire industry as a whole.

It's important to know what a person admires, and why, and how fully they appreciate the strengths and flaws of those whom they admire. Any kind of blind admiration is not a good sign.

Certainly ascribing all of Jobs's ideas to other people from whom he copied them is a pretty good heuristic for ignoring people too.

That said: I suspect Jobs's view of the anti-solicitation deal was not that he was lowering compensation (although no doubt it had this effect) but keeping employees focused on his projects. After all, being chased by headhunters is very distracting, and if the net effect is you get a great offer, a better counter-offer, and stay, as far as Jobs is concerned you've just wasted a bunch of his time.

I'll always hold respect for him, despite what people say he was just as much a part of the home computer revolution as Gates and Woz.

No one admires Steve Jobs because he was a domineering unethical asshole. Those qualities are not rare in American business.

People admire Steve Jobs because he repeatedly built and led teams who built and launched products that transformed major industries. The ability to do that is extremely rare and valuable.

How is that working out now? From my vantage point, Apple is standing still.

Is your point that Steve Jobs' is unable to bring together innovative teams, while dead?

No, i guess he is diminishing steve's role in success of apple. He is saying jobs is gone and apple is still standing still without him

You are aware of Apple's history since 1997, right? Apple was in a far more dire situation than Sony is right now. Show me a CEO who can turn around Sony in a 5 years timeframe and you have someone getting even in the same ballpark as Jobs in terms of leadership and product vision.

There's a lot to be said about his character, especially how he treated others (although it appears to me that he matured quite a bit after his departure from Apple in the 80ies). But I don't think you can diminish his role at the biggest turnaround in IT history so far.

Confirmation bias.

Apple did plenty of 'standing still' back when Steve Jobs was around.

Good, I'll avoid you as well. Whole lot of good your mindless binary worldview does you.

There are legitimate discussions to be had about what Jobs actually did vs the perception people have of him. But there's no doubting that the former category includes a number of meaningful and industry-defining accomplishments.

Unfortunately, those like you who aren't done constantly arguing an equally biased anti-Jobs/Apple view seem to think that rehashing the truly dick part of who Steve could be discounts what he did (often by citing other folks involved / inspired, as if it doesn't take a village to build a revolutionary product). I'm not really sure I'd ever miss interacting with such an ideologue.

All this rage for a salesman? Wow...

While this is just more detail on old news, I can't help feeling Colligan needs to get as much credit for his statements made here as the others should receive in punishment in forming the cartel to start with. His only failing appears to be not reporting it.

Still don't understand how so many in this business can admire someone like Jobs. It's refreshing to hear about someone who stood up to his "charm".

He lead the design of tons of groundbreaking products.

He was also a world class grudge bearing short tempered vindictive jerk.

I just want to clear up the falsehood here that he was the lead design of any product - read the biography. He was lead designer on no product that went to market.

I hope every developer at Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other companies that are supposedly just "building a defensive bulwark of patents" sees this.

You're not building fences or walls for your company. You're building land mines.

but hey, i will get a $5000 bonus if i just sign this paper. What harm can it do?

Uh, I'm pretty sure any company would be within their rights to fire you for refusing to cooperate with a patent filing. Some contracts (such as mine) even stipulate such cooperation after termination.

on most positions (anything other than research) it is mostly optional to engage on it. and people get proactive because of the bonus.

> You're building land mines

I prefer to think of it as stockpiling toxic nuclear waste. A land mine explodes causing isolated damage to a single unlucky individual one time. Toxic nuclear waste on the other hand poisons an entire city (ie. area of technology) and is pretty much indestructible until its half life (or several of them) expires.

Like nuclear weapons, but without the MAD.

I'm sure John Gruber will find a way to spin this in a pro-Apple light.

This is old news. You can see his spin here: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/01/23/asymmetry

Only he doesn't spin it as far as I see it:

"Could be legal trouble for Apple (and a bunch of other companies), though"

I don't have a dog in the fight, but "The man did not beat around the bush", is soft praise for his frankness. If you believe it was immoral and illegal, this is definitely spin.

My take: "Steve Jobs likely broke the law, and engaged in an activity that denied thousands of engineers full market wages. I suspect his motivations were to enrich Apple to stroke his own ego."

Why spin it when he could simply not cover it? (Which he did, by the way.)

Gruber actually does post things that cast Jobs in a negative light. Get over it.

[citation needed]

Here's one off the top of my head: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/08/07/marco-icloud-sec...

Here's another: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/03/26/icloud-hamburger

I know I've seen a number over the past few years, but searching the website is unfortunately difficult because Gruber is so prolific.

Both of those criticisms post-date Jobs.

Gruber's coverage of the Foxconn deaths was truly something to behold. I stopped reading him about that time.

The media massively misrepresented that controversy. He was right to call people out on it, in my opinion.

I take issue with your suggestion that Gruber was putting his admiration of Apple over people's lives. He's not a moustache-twirling villain.

I am pretty sure that I've seen these. I have to say, I admire Steve Jobs in a sense that I admire Frank Underwood character in House of Cards serial.

Agreed, it's a cold world and sometimes you gotta get your hands dirty.

Uh, no. It's more like "what he did was interesting, in the way that a lot admonishing things you should never do are interesting."

Yeah, just discouraging to see so many successful people using shady tactics. I think it's a lot more rewarding to succeed without being shady, and maybe a lot of people agree and that's just not newsworthy?

Too bad Palm can't sue Apple for this: http://www.everythingicafe.com/ios-7-multitasking-brings-bac...

Yes it's too bad Palm can't sue Apple for using the "swipable card tabbing" UI that Palm took directly from Safari on the original iPhone.

http://origin.arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/iphone-review...

If tech had a truly free market for talent it would be wild! You'd have top tier coders signing pro athlete sized contracts regularly. I can see why they use patent litigation as a weapon to prevent this, clever and sinister.

if there was ever a reason for hackers to work out a way to measure the affect good coding has on the bottom line - this is it

Or good spelling!

This would never happen. The market for programmers and athletes are wildly different (winner take all markets).

tl;dr:

  jobs: let's not hire each other's employees anymore, m-kay?
  colligan (Palm CEO): thanks steve, but no thanks.
  jobs: have you seen our patents and pile of cash, ed?
        you're entering a world of pain.

So Apple believes that they have eternal rights to their employees once they paid for their time once... Not a good sign for their customers.

To be fair, it was found that the rest of Silicon Valley (Google, Adobe, Microsoft etc) were doing the same thing.

The second line should read.

colligan (Palm CEO): thanks steve, but no thanks. also, sure that's not legal.

Couldn't Apple have asked employees to sign a non-compete agreement, before starting work on critical company projects, ?

If your goal is to protect the company it seems easier to enforce than a makeshift cartel agreement with other CEOs

Also, wasn't the agreement about recruiting being taboo, but its ok to hire cold applicants?

Non-compete clauses are void in California

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#California

Which should be a strong hint that accomplishing the exact same thing through another route is just as wrong.

Non competes are a legal minefield - and quite hard (and expensive) to enforce

Basically all courts agree that the rights of an individual to find employments to support their own needs and their family trumps a company's desire to beat its competitors.

If Apple really were worried about losing secrets, they could have paid for garden leave, e.g. pay employees who leave for 6 months to just stay at home.

What a dick.

I think most people who read the book know that this is far alarming news and frankly surprised more stories have not come out. A couple weeks ago, the stories came out about holding wages down for engineers with Jobs at the center.

Steve Jobs is incredible and arguably the greatest entrepreneur of all time. But he is an extreme outlier and anomaly to say the least. He got away with so much being the best. Although one could argue with the way he changed the world we live in, we're not terribly unhappy with news like this.

Everybody is talking about Jobs' personality and behavior and if Palm suffered because of that, but for me it's just another example of how wrong the whole legal system is. Instead of saying "we have more guns than you do, so shut up" somebody can just say "we have more money and lawyers than you do, so shut up". So if the system built to control bullying is used for bullying then what it's worth?

Ah, thinking of it just depresses me.

"Wage theft" goes beyond the large tech companies. It it institutionalized by the investors as well. Investors won't invest if employees are paid market value. That's a reason why it's better to be a consultant than an employee.

Everybody is trying to manipulate the game to their benefit. C'est la vie.

Christ, what an asshole.

I can't be the only one who disapproves of the misuse if the term, "an offer he can't refuse."

Its used incorrectly everywhere.

well, you could be. Not sure people take the expression that seriously.

Boo.

At least this author uses it to describe a threat.

Most writers deploy the term to describe a really good offer, which grates upon my soul enormously.

Interesting fake highlighting.

It's clear in my eyes that Palm did not fail due to market forces. They had the best smart phone at the time, and I purchased one and enjoyed it immensely.

I now have an iPhone and I hate it but I have to tolerate it. Take my account for what it's worth, but PalmOS was clearly superior from a productivity standpoint. This is cemented in my mind further by the integration of Palm or Palm-like features into iOS since iOS7.

If these threats had any basis, then Palm would be able to sue Apple since now Apple feels entitled to rip off Palm's design decisions, sadly, 'that train has sailed', but now we're left with an uberpowerful Apple who only answers to God.

I don't get the (mostly posthumous) Jobs bashing that seems to be swelling up. It's seemingly a reaction to the fete'ing he got whilst alive, and I do ended if it is the same people?

He was human - and unsurprisingly a mass of contradictions - venal and spiritual, visionary and vicious, successful and a failure.

Lets not act surprised he used strong arm tactics to get his way - and let's not get too happy accepting Palms CEO as hero in a story he is telling.

I did bash him while he was alive too. What is your point? he was human. A criminal human. So what? How committing crimes is spiritual?

"Everyone has contradictions" is not an excuse for any and every instance of bad behavior.

He built an extensive marketing company around aesthetic changes and "innovations" of existing (sometimes decades old) technology and amassed large quantities of wealth and influence in the process, all using illegal and questionably legal tactics. There is almost literally nothing to admire about him, other than his marketing genius (which was, and still is, in my opinion, far and away the best the industry has seen in years, or decades, or perhaps ever).

I'm sorry, I honestly don't see the problem here. Is it illegal or somehow immoral to identify the consequence of a business decision?

Well, as matter of fact Jobs was engaged in intimidation aimed to maintain an arrangement that has been found to be illegal (the "anti-poaching" 'agreement').

Really good point. I really really should have read the full article, not just the title, and the highlighted section. I thought I saw this text almost verbatim before having to do with a licensing dispute.

Isn't a mugging simply identifying the consequence of a business decision?

In the same way that spatial manipulation of an object from the boundaries defined by its legal owner is considered theft.

but that's not what is happening. You are coercing someone via threats and intimidation to join you in an illegal act. don't get confused by the fact it's described with 'business sounding" words.

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