What I'm mostly learning though this saga is that an uncomfortable number of SV executives are feckless weaklings in the face of a sociopath like Jobs.
I think that scenario played out a couple of times in Jobs' career. He would do something ruthless or somewhat distasteful, but because the people he was pushing his idea on stood to profit in some way they agreed with it, even though it enriched Jobs a lot more than it enriched them.
So, basically, he did the same thing for employees that he did for iTunes music licensing.
Note I do not condone the behavior and would have liked to see it turn into a thermonuclear bidding war for engineers just like everyone else. But I sure as hell understand why a lot of these people rolled over. I do like that Facebook told Apple to get fucked though. That was nice to see.
This period we live in today is where we are still building the nascent infrastructure of what is likely going to be looked upon as a seminal and epochal change in the species' economic (at least, if not other areas of human endeavor) development in the far (10+ generations) future. Another impactful change like this won't happen again for a long, long time; this is mass adoption of the printing press change, modern banking practices establishment type change. Entire Great Law of the Iroquois spans of time (seven generations) pass without these types of changes. We would likely need some development like perfecting self-sustaining fusion power or Drexlerian nanotech to arrive at such a pivotal moment again.
If you do not want to bemoan in late life regrets for not seizing this historical moment and for leaving it to non-technical people to seize it instead, then the wage-fixing should be a clear signal that what we build has far more significance than technical accomplishment in exchange for temporary compensation. There is vast wealth being constructed here, and lots of non-engineers are intent upon seizing control of it. Wage-fixing is a tool of such control, but not in the obvious manner. The subtext not explored sufficiently is the wage-fixing serves a larger purpose: wages high enough to keep employees satisfied to stay on (and the wage-fixing "encourages" them to stay in one place), but not quite high enough to cause too many of them to literally afford the opportunity to strike out on their own and capture a slice of the wealth being created by using their creative efforts to build their own piece of the emerging wealth. That to me is the more meaningful aspect of control about the wage-fixing. The mentality of the top leadership at these companies is decidedly not cornucopian-oriented in the time frames they operate in when thinking about employee compensation, so leaving and successfully building anything on your own is a straight zero sum loss to them (because time preference differ between the parties).
I don't need to be telling HN readers this as here lies gathered an immense pool of people breaking out and building their own piece of the future wealth horizon; that's preaching to the choir. But the wider technical audience needs to be informed about this battle for control over a future wealth source of humanity.
Seems to me the downside to Apple of having their illegal collusion exposed would have had to be far greater than the cost of the engineers Palm could have hired away.
I'm not saying that's right--because it's not. I'm just saying, thinking that Apple pushed Google around is the wrong reading. Google did what they did because they wanted to.