I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey?
Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?
This is also my impression after reading Isaacson's biography and Creativity, Inc. At Pixar, he behaved like a feudal lord because he pretty much owned the place and they relied on his money to keep the lights on.
I remember Isaacson's interview of Woznick, and The Woz stated he felt Jobs could have done most of the great things he did without being a jerk. In other words, the jerkiness appeared to be a quirk and not a business tool from Woz's perspective. But then again, the Woz often didn't understand the marketing side of things, according to some of his critics.
> At Pixar, he behaved like a feudal lord because he pretty much owned the place and they relied on his money to keep the lights on.
How do you mean by "behaved like a feudal lord"?
Admittedly not read up on Jobs (sacrilege in this venue, I know), so I'm struggling to understand why he who pays the piper calls the tune is somehow objectionable.
You can own something without pettiness and employing someone does not give you total control over that employee. In my mind, a feudal Lord is someone who wants everyone to know and acknowledge they are in charge and demands exacting obedience.
Still not quite making the link between "feudal lord" and "pettiness" (both seem equally subjective/vague).
By "total control", do you mean well beyond the boundaries of labor law? In my mind, I'm admittedly inclined to interpret this color as a consequence of the music stopping at an unprofitable creative house with an internal culture of unabashed freedom on someone else's dime.
Maybe I just need to read the books mentioned by the parent sometime.
Perhaps "petty dictator" for connotations (a would-be not an absolute dictator). We might or might not have many too-distant impressions of what ancient feudalism involved. For example, I have heard suggested that it was a system fundamentally characterized by reciprocal obligations upward and downward (including a kind of labor law?). Abused no doubt, but not lawless.
Here let me explain it with concrete examples. Let's say you're a smart engineer, you know how to write code and make things happen and you have pretty good idea of what users seem to want or need.
You have a boss and you have a meeting with your boss to make a decision about including a new feature you've coded up a prototype for, into a product that is going to be released in a year. You demo it, and it goes mostly OK but there are some hitches.
You boss has several ways of responding. One way could be to call you an idiot, a stupid idiot who's wasting everybody's time. The other way would be to provide a more polite way of saying that the feature might not be ready yet and could use some refinement.
Multiple employees of Jobs reported this sort of behavior (screaming, belitting, etc):
"""Jobs stormed into a meeting and started shouting that they were “fucking dickless assholes."""
""" He shouted, "You guys don't know what you're doing. I'm going to get someone else to do the ads because this is fucked up."""
"""A few weeks later he called Bob Belleville, one of the hardware designers on the Xerox Star team. "Everything you've ever done in your life is shit," Jobs said, "so why don't you come work for me?"""
"""When Steve had to make cutbacks at Pixar, he fired people and didn't give any severance pay."""
"""“How old were you when you lost your virginity?" he asked. The candidate looked baffled. “What did you say?” “Are you a virgin?” Jobs asked. The candidate sat there flustered, so Jobs changed the subject. “How many times have you taken LSD?” Hertzfeld recalled, “The poor guy was turning varying shades of red, so I tried to change the subject and asked a straightforward technical question.”""
"""To address the problem, Jobs gathered the MobileMe team in Apple's auditorium and asked: "Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" When the team gave their answers, Jobs replied, "Then why the fuck doesn't it do that?"
Jobs then fired the MobileMe boss on the spot and replaced him with Eddie Cue."""
I think Jony Ive pinpointed it:
"""I once asked him why he gets so mad about stuff. He said, "But I don't stay mad." He has this very childish ability to get really worked up about something, and it doesn't stay with him at all. But, there are other times, I think honestly, when he's very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don't apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that."""
The only question is: if Jobs hadn't been an asshole, would the computing world have come so far so fast, and does that justify his behavior?
Being a jerk is always bad. The only difference is that people who aren't "paying the piper" don't get away with it for very long before someone throws them out.
Just because you can get away with it doesn't mean it's ok.
Playing devil's advocate, I'm honestly not sure how I'd behave if I dropped a $10 million personal fortune[1] (1986 dollars; $27.2 million buying power today) for controlling stake in a venture and execution wasn't going as I had envisioned. Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole.
I mean, the argument is essentially one of "sure, he may have been completely awful, but it all worked out so, if we assume that's the reason things worked out (ignoring the myriad other factors and pure luck) then we suppose that, however they had acted or the damage caused, they were right to do so. The ends justify the means - even if we can't tell for sure or not that by those awful means we arrived at those desired ends."
Frankly, it's ex post facto justification by false entailment. I don't buy it.
Not the person you responded to but I find it an interesting situation. I agree with you that jobs (from what I've read) seems to be awful but at the same time I don't believe theft is okay. If I pay someone to do a job and they choose not to do the job after taking my money they have stolen my money. I am not okay with that. In this case jobs invested in them. It was clearly enough money to give him power over them. He had an agenda, they decided they didn't like the agenda and weren't going to do it his way and he came in and cracked heads (in an awful way probably). They can choose not pick his way, but BEFORE they take his money. Once they take the money they are obligated to do it his way or give the money back in my opinion.
Jobs paid that money for the business as it was at the time of sale - not for what he wanted it to be in some theoretical future - and he got precisely that. The theft analogy doesn't hold because the deal was completed upon transfer of the organisation. There could be no theft, only the inability to meet the expectations Jobs placed on their employees - for which I'm sure many were fired. That's the only prerogative Jobs purchased when they purchased - and were delivered - ownership of the organisation. That is to say, they bought - and were given - the decision making power over who to hire or fire and for what reasons. Nothing more, nothing less.
> Playing devil's advocate, I'm honestly not sure how I'd behave if I dropped a $10 million personal fortune[1] (1986 dollars; $27.2 million buying power today) for controlling stake in a venture and execution wasn't going as I had envisioned. Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole.
So if someone spent for example 44*10^9 dollars on some venture, would it still be ok to be jerk, or would it be counterproductive to viability of such investment?
> Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole
What does this even mean in the context of the story from TFA? The "impediment" was one of his employees getting a competing job offer, and the "irreparable damage" was...having to actually pay someone as much as they'd be valued elsewhere? That's not a reasonable way to behave, and masking it in impersonal language doesn't somehow make it more reasonable.
I've never been a fan of Jobs or Jobs' Cultists for exactly that reason, but... there is room for jerks. If everyone got along, no progress would ever be made.
I forget the author, but someone famous once noted, "The reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. The unreasonable man adapts his environment to him. Therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable men."
Like any quote, there's a hint of truth to it and also not applicable in ALL situations.
Interestingly not everybody seems to take away the same lession from what's happening at Twitter. I keep reading from people who say that finally now people can focus on what matters and are not allowed down by lazy people, yadda yadda. Some even claim that Twitter now works faster for them and is generally better.
How can we be objective about subjective things when we can't even be objective by objective things?
Executives paid bucketloads to come in and lead a Transformation™ can only dream about the empowerment of actually making changes that Musk is enjoying.
That job tends to be virtually impossible as companies launch a transformation then reject each individual change as "this is fine" or as a sacred cow.
If, to survive, you must change many things quickly, some decisions will be wrong, but that's why you iterate.
Whether it's "a small price to pay" depends on each and every individual that paid the price.
I don't think it makes any sense for 1 single person to decide if the price paid was small, simply because they don't know what actual price was paid (in terms of suffering).
Also, it sounds to me that's you're assuming that's a necessitated price to pay, which I don't believe is true (but I don't have any examples either).
If the two options are "Pixar exists, but some employees were treated unfairly" or "Pixar never exists", I will choose the first. Whether or not there are other options is not a hypothetical I care about, I am interested in thinking about the morality of ends vs means of this scenario.
"Steve took a chance on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer-animated films; the one thing he always said was to simply 'make it great.' He is why Pixar turned out the way we did and his strength, integrity, and love of life has made us all better people. He will forever be a part of Pixar's DNA."
You're quoting the top two Pixar executives, and from immediately after Jobs' death as well. How about someone who isn't a millionaire?
aren't credible because they became so successful that they're now millionaire executives
Yes that's what I'm saying. The statement of two men who stood at the top of the ladder about the man who put them there immediately after that man has died is absolutely not credible in regards to judging how that man treated regular workers. At all.
A legendary animator and director, both who helped found Pixar with Jobs, aren't credible because they became so successful that they're now millionaire executives?
Jobs didn’t found Pixar; it spun out of George Lucas’ world and works and Jobs bought into it when it was several years old, even several years with the name Pixar. The Wikipedia article is self contradictory as its first paragraphs talk as of hee were a as founder, but hee was a much later major investor.
So far I haven't seen a counter experience from you about how Jobs treated the "regular workers" at Pixar, so as I see it, it's a quote from people who were close to what happened versus the absence of a counter experience.
Oh please. Googling "steve jobs bully pixar" reveals at least one story of horrible behavior directed toward regular staff members.
Jobs could be a bully, it's well documented. Pixar wasn't somehow immune to this behavior.
You've painted a utilitarian, partisan viewpoint: that the cultural and technological significance of Pixar outweighs any negative experiences of staff. The two are not easily comparable. How do you quantify them, what's the denominator? Jobs didn't have a crystal ball, he couldn't know Pixar would succeed. What was his calculus? How did he determine the trade-offs between success and bullying? Finally, cultural/tech significance is most certainly possible without putting staff through negative experiences.
You're suggesting an unreal scenario, so the thought experiment isn't going to do much good, IMO. Each employee gets to make that call themselves, "do I want to be treated badly?"
Fresh graduates may not realise they are being treated badly, lacking a frame of reference. Immigrants may be on a visa where they have no choice but to put up with it or leave the country.
Locals who've been around a bit, who know their discipline, the proven (local) best of the best? They don't stay on teams led by bullies.
It's not an unreal scenario at all. It's entirely plausible that a company falls apart when lacking the specific motivators and pressures that Jobs brought, and therefore never really exists in the first place. What's unreal about that?
I addressed why the hypothetical is limited to two options, and taking a subset of plausible scenarios does not reduce the plausibility of the selected scenarios.
Yes, because a and b represent a specific combination I said I was interested in exploring. What you've shown doesn't lower the plausibility of those scenarios. Are you being intentionally contrarian or is there a reason why you are trying to muddy a simple thought experiment?
That makes it unreal. It changed the environment too much to exclude it. Ignoring it breaks stuff. I'm not saying thought experiments are bad — do them often myself — I'm saying my response to get thought experiment itself is: it can't work like that (riffing of an unrelated but recent comment from yesterday where I'm the one doing the thought experiment as an existence proof, it's a "spherical cow in a vacuum" model).
It's not a nonsensical "spherical cow in vacuum" thought experiment to say "Pixar exists but some employees are treated bad" vs "Pixar doesn't exist". If you think that it becomes impossible for a rational mind to weigh those two choices, then there's no point in me continuing this discussion with you.
If Pixar didn't exist, the same people would do the same (or close enough) work under a different brand. Quite possibly with each other. That's as distinct as two identical dice placed in no specific order, i.e. not. Ergo, not a realistic scenario.
I’ve noticed that a lot of HN comments tend to be utilitarian, in an “ends justify the means” sort of way. This can lead to all sorts of ethical quandaries but it seems prevalent in business.
The joke was that under extreme duress, and individual (or a team) might produce a miracle.
The ethical question is: if it's a genuine miracle (say, a discovery or invention that breaks new ground or was previously thought to be impossible), can the duress be justified?
If the question is "Is the limited bullying and serfdom of 40 people (the original Pixar team size) justified by bringing joy to billions of people (more accurate than millions) for decades (and likely a lot longer)?" Then I answer yes. I think that's a small price to pay.
I think you overestimate net joy brought by Pixar. Some people watched a movie and were entertained for the duration of the movie, some were moved by it and it lead to a couple of hours worth of joy more. Some did not understand the message in the movie and just liked colorful pictures. Yes, there were a couple of movies, but not like tens or hundreds. In the end those movies would not have the success they enjoyed without powerful marketing and distribution machine. Those movies were also used as a vehicle to sell overpriced toys.
I prefer not to mythologize (very good) products of billion dollar companies too much, even if they could stand on their own.
Amen brother. He was not a "bully". He was a coach. A tough coach. Anyone could have walked away. No one was being forced to work at a top .1% company in the world. If you were there it's because you wanted to be do your best work and be part of the best. You wanted to make the world a better place. You believed in the power of these devices to do good, and to fight evil.
Jobs wasn't out there hurting civilians on the streets. You want to see a real bully, go to Ukraine and see what Putin is doing to civilians.
You talk as if Jobs brought us innovation that never would have arrived without him. In reality, he was able to get it to us a year or two earlier and maybe with a little more style.
Being slightly earlier to market and with a little more style is what made him a business juggernaut. But I don't think being first really means all that much when it comes to an ends justifying the means conversation.
Given the choice, I'll take the product not made under duress, even if I have to wait a bit longer.
> You talk as if Jobs brought us innovation that never would have arrived without him. In reality, he was able to get it to us a year or two earlier and maybe with a little more style.
I think this is a reasonable perspective, and you could be right, but you could be wrong too. We don't get to run an experiment on this one. There are obviously huge things Jobs did that I take issue with (I hate the copyright and DRM crap in Apple Music, for example, and the whole patent war with Samsung was terrible), but at the same time, he grew up decades before me and I got the privilege of living in a world he helped created. Who knows where the world would be without him pushing it.
> Given the choice, I'll take the product not made under duress, even if I have to wait a bit longer.
I think we may be able to get to a world where we can have that, but not in today's world, IMO. There's still far too much evil and not enough infra for truth, that if the good people don't push much harder than the bad and indifferent, we may never get there. Of course, not something we can test, just have to discuss and place our bets.
I think that fact could be reflected in his use of coffee enemas to treat his pancreatic cancer that was easily treatable with chemotherapy which the coffee enemas ultimately resulted in his own death.
"According to the American Cancer Society, for all stages of pancreatic cancer combined, the one-year relative survival rate is 20%, and the five-year rate is 9%."
And don't forget, Steve Jobs died in 2011, which means treatment was being received for years prior. That's 12+ years ago.
"Easily treatable" is indeed a bit of a stretch, but the cancer variant Jobs suffered from (pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor) seems to have a ~61% five-year survival rate, so that's significantly better. If you're going to get pancreatic cancer, that's the variant you want to choose.
Did his choices hasten his death? At least one oncologist thinks that "the end result would probably have been the same"[1]:
"Had he been operated on then, would most likely would have happened is that Jobs’ apparent survival would have been nine months longer but the end result would probably have been the same. None of this absolves the alternative medicine that Jobs tried or suggests that waiting to undergo surgery wasn’t harmful, only that in hindsight we can conclude that it probably didn’t make a difference. At the time of his diagnosis and during the nine months afterward during which he tried woo instead of medicine, it was entirely reasonable to be concerned that the delay was endangering his life, because it might have been. It was impossible to know until later—and, quite frankly, not even then—whether Jobs’ delaying surgery contributed to his death. Even though what I have learned suggests that this delay probably didn’t contribute to Jobs’ death, it might have. Even though I’m more sure than I was before, I can never be 100% sure. Trust me when I say yet again that I really, really wish I could join with the skeptics and doctors proclaiming that “alternative medicine killed Steve Jobs,” but I can’t, at least not based on the facts as I have been able to learn them."
He was willing to be a bully anytime it benefited Apple’s customers. He seemed quite predictable but unusual that he could care about Apple and it’s customers and be completely indifferent to the feelings of the people in his immediate vicinity.
They were competing, to Jobs it could've looked like either Apple or Google was going to stay alive. It is natural for people to threaten competition and I guess not like your competition?
And that is in the infamous anti-worker US; though I think you meant unenforceable (the companies wouldn't be able to use the legal system to enforce them)
In the rest of the world Steve Jobs / Apple would have been in a bigger trouble just from the start of the emails.
Fine print: Said regimes may or may not have been the result of us sending military and weapons to kill any and all possible human rights movements and keep slave labor going.
A bully? It's business. If he can get Google to not hire people just by being tough on the phone that's a win. Costs almost nothing.
My father once worked at an electronics contracting firm. One of his co-workers who was in charge of purchasing parts was masterful while on the phone with suppliers. He drove a very hard bargain and often shouted and swore at suppliers to extract the best prices. Bullying or business?
> He drove a very hard bargain and often shouted and swore at suppliers to extract the best prices. Bullying or business?
I worked for a guy who had built a business from his kitchen table to 90,000 sq ft building employing 100 people.
He was on vacation and met up with a long-time supplier of a material he used in his products, and after dinner one night the supplier told him he'd be increasing his prices by some large amount. They had a huge argument, and as soon as he came home he started a new plan. He'd make the material himself.
He found a person with a Phd in that field, bought the necessary equipment, and started producing his own polyurethane foams. After another 10 years, he found his own customers and was making more money reselling the foam than he was using it in his own products, and ended up selling the company to a chemical conglomerate for tens of millions of dollars.
Another fun fact: this guy would do all of his drawings in Microsoft Paint. Architectural drawings, product designs, everything. Blew my mind. He would fly tutors in for the week as he tried to learn AutoCAD, Solidworks, etc, but he hated them all.
> One of his co-workers who was in charge of purchasing parts was masterful while on the phone with suppliers. He drove a very hard bargain and often shouted and swore at suppliers to extract the best prices. Bullying or business?
Bullying. Full Stop.
This behavior gets people thrown out of restaurants and bars. If I ever catch someone treating one of my employees like that, and the employee is caught like a deer in the headlights because it is a big deal, I have absolutely no qualms stepping in and firing the client representative on the spot (clients can get back into our good graces by swapping representatives with apologies). I don't care how big the client is (I also perform receivables management to ensure no client is ever put into a position where they can threaten my book of business).
I've been told once by a purchasing manager after speaking with a client's company counsel that I drive a hard but fair bargain. Happy repeat clients to this day. We respected each other without anyone resorting to toddler-teenager tantrums during the negotiations.
When dealing with wait staff, hotel staff, valets, pool cleaners, all the way to CIO's and boards of directors, bullying is never acceptable. That you attempt to put a patina of respectability upon it by making it "just business" is also unacceptable. It's extremely disrespectful and rude, not to say the lowest, crudest, ugliest, low-cognitive effort form of negotiating. Negotiating to me is another communications channel conveying valuable information about how your culture reacts when the stakes are high, time is short, and actionable information sparse. Just like in a critical production down outage.
When bullying in business is your SOP, the network effects of positive collaboration powered by increasingly pervasive technology advancing upon us will deliver far more attenuated benefits to you than your competitors.
Being an arse, and becoming resistant to arseholes on the other side, can become an arms race in some sectors. It tends to break down after a while, when people on the supply end start “sacking” customers because they get enough business from the others that they can be choosy, then the cycle begins afresh.
Bully, as others have said. And I'll add this: if "business" has become something that excuses bullying then so much the worse for that notion of what business is.
Suppose I go up to some person I know and say "Give me $100!". They politely decline. I become aggressive and shout and swear at them. Eventually they give in, as a result of which I am $100 richer and they are $100 poorer. I take it we can all agree that this is not reasonable behaviour. (Perhaps it's even criminal; I guess it depends on the exact nature of my shouting and swearing.)
I don't see how such behaviour becomes any better when it's done in pursuit of corporate gain rather than individual gain.
You might say: ah, but it's understood that this sort of thing is part of the game: it's just what happens when people negotiate with one another. Maybe that's true, but I don't think that's any justification. In some cultures it's been "part of the game" that if two men both fancy the same woman then they fight one another and maybe one of them dies. In some cultures it's been "part of the game" that if a man dies his living wife is burned to death on his funeral pyre. Something can be customary but also harmful.
Sometimes you hear people talking about what an awful thing "capitalism" is. That's not a popular sort of opinion around these parts, but I think this is the sort of thing that fosters such opinions: the idea that nothing can be really bad if it is motivated by the search for profit. To hell with that. Yes, some things motivated by profit are bad. And yes, from what you say your father's co-worker's behaviour was one of those things.
>I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey?
That could wind up in a bidding war that could end up affecting many employees and salaries going up a lot. That's a lot of lost money for Apple, which makes Steve Jobs mad. Additionally, some employees would still be lost in the war, slowing down Apple development.
>Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?
I think it's implied that the employee wouldn't find out. I think Steve Jobs would be more angry if Google revoked the offer and blamed it on Steve Jobs than if Google went forward with the offer.
I don't think it was just money for him. He had a huge ego too. And he cared about this products, in fact he would risk a lot of money for them. I think cook is much more driven by money and it shows. Much less risk taking.
Don't not consider that Sergei and Larry are not just as motivated by money as Steve, and trying to tap into leverage potential developed elsewhere, because it's a way to 'do more stuff that also makes more money'.
It's 'small scale hardball' between CEO's and that's mostly it.
Drama. The 'Young and Restless of the Valley', Tuesday afternoons @ 2pm.
Bullying implies a power imbalance. This is google we are talking about.
They did poach a huge chunk of the safari team. They then did launch a competing browser and aggressively pushed that browser globally. They forked the mainline project of WebKit and created blink - for reasons relating to Chrome product roadmap. It was a big deal when they did it.
But Jobs predicting this is what they were up to and calling google and complaining they are poaching a whole team from Apple. Is bullying?
Which CEO wouldn’t be upset at an entire core team being targeted by a competitor? It’s not price fixing, it’s not illegal (to be upset or to call another ceo and complain).
> But Jobs predicting this is what they were up to and calling google and complaining they are poaching a whole team from Apple. Is bullying?
How would you feel if you were actively looking for another job and the CEO of your company repeatedly called one the the companies that was going to give you an offer to yell at them and try to intimidate them with threats of "war" into not hiring you?
That sure sounds a lot like bullying, even if you don't think it is bullying, it is certainly an illegal business practice. This isn't just my opinion, but that of the DOJ and the court.
While that case was settled without a trial, I'll note that the judge took the rare step of rejecting the first settlement agreement because Apple and Google didn't pay enough.
Want that for non complete agreements? Not for CEOs shouting at each other.
This want “an individual looking for a job”. This was a google going after an entire team.
Honestly everyone has the bullying round the wrong way here. Steve jobs was an ass in this instance, but his actions are likely 99.9% of other CEOs actions
Some places have made those illegal or greatly restricted them, hopefully that will spread.
> This want “an individual looking for a job”. This was a google going after an entire team.
It was google trying to hire ~3 internal recommendations. From the emails it sounds like for the main hiring prospect was potentially more interested if all 3 got offers and was also already looking at offer from other companies. I don't specifically see anything about it being an "entire team", so I'm curious where you got that from.
> Steve jobs was an ass in this instance, but his actions are likely 99.9% of other CEOs actions
I think the 99.9% number is a bit too high (and certainly hard to source). I do think you are correct that this (and other) illegal business practices are extremely common among CEOs, especially in companies of this size. Though I think CEOs of companies of this size are usually quite a bit more circumspect in how they go about it.
Again, the legal way to approach this is to make the developers an offer of better projects (which is sounds like Apple tried), money or other perks to make the job attractive. A volatile CEO who did what Jobs did here would probably count against that (if the employees knew what he did.)
> That could wind up in a bidding war that could end up affecting ...
If he called up a competitor and complained about them undercutting prices on competing products, and threatened "This means war", would you be explaining how tolerating competitive bidding is bad for the company? Everyone knows that, and knows, I thought, that the only legitimate response is "Tough shit."
He was a dick. And there was a strong trend around 2010-2015ish that essentially said "Jobs was a dick and a genius. Therefore I must act like a dick, to prove that I'm a genius". So many startup CEOs acting like assholes to prove they're revolutionary visionaries.
>“I never use anyone else’s products but my own. I literally don’t think there’s anything to be learned from other people’s stuff,” says Nguyen.
>And then, that very night, everything came crashing down. Color execs started noticing that users were quick to rate the app a measly one or two stars out of five–nails in the coffin, given an oversaturated app market that was spawning more than 1,000 new apps a day. The problem was simple: In order for Color to work, many users had to be in a similar location, but since Color hadn’t widely seeded the app prelaunch, users arrived to a social network that resembled a ghost town. “I wanna see that pitch deck,” ranted influential tech blogger Robert Scoble. “It must have had some magic unicorn dust sprinkled on it.” A mock satirical pitch deck began circulating around tech circles, spoofing Color’s attempt to capitalize on every web 2.0 cliché: “People. Colors. Apps. Cats. Bacon. Organic. Bieber. Mobile. Social. Local. Pivot.”
Honestly it's probably more time than anything like Theranos.
The last great Steve Jobs keynote was 2010, the iPad announcement. Any 25-30 year old founders nowadays would have been, what, 15 years old? Maybe there were a few enraptured tweens watching that stream, locking in a dream of being just like Steve Jobs that day, but at some point he's just another old dead guy to any new startup founders.
I mean, yes, and I say this without any intention of minimizing or justifiying, but: Which of the leaders/founders of firms at that scale and success do you imagine do NOT have a history of bullying?
A certain amount of what we might call "force of personality" is required to get something off the ground.
Once it succeeds, these people live their lives in a place where there is an enormous power and wealth differential between them and everyone around them.
Those two factors will absolutely put you at risk for shitty behavior, I suspect.
Steve Jobs was a ruthless, envious asshole. He reacted this way inside Apple. The fact that Apple did as well as it did was despite this being a pretty well known central part of how the business was run.
"Pure capitalism", or "war" as Steve Jobs put it in one of his emails, is a race to the bottom in terms of company profits because of countless scenarios like this. I want employee X because he will bring $Y value to me, so I can technically pay anything below $Y for him. But then your company also has similar logic. If we simply aggressively compete then these cost of any employee, who has a skillset where supply < demand, will rapidly approach the value they bring to any company - which can be immense. And simultaneously the profit of our companies will approach zero.
This is very much in the interest of employees, but not in the interest of companies. So companies have a motivation to implicitly (legal) or explicitly (illegal, slap on the wrist punishment) cooperate to keep wages somewhat fixed. One way to do this is to not proactively "poach" each other's employees. If you hire a Bob, I won't actively try to recruit Bob - though I will extend him an offer if he, himself, proactively approaches me.
2 years after this email exchange, you had this [1]. A Google recruiter tries to poach an Apple employee. Steve contacts Google, Google responds that the recruiter will be "terminated within the hour", and Steve responds with a smiley face. They were sued over this [2] and "punished" with a fine that can't even be called a slap on the wrist. Now they do the same, but more cleverly. But having recruiters just spam everybody with endless recruitment offers, they can claim to be competing yet those recruitment offers become meaningless.
You completely misunderstood. In an idealized free labor market scenario, the wages of the scarce specialist employees would go up to the point that Apple or Google could barely make a profit. The race to the bottom is on profits, not wages. Just like small businesses typically compete on sales price until they only have a trickle of a profit.
To avoid this, companies use various tricks to fix wages such that they don't have to pay even the highest valued employees more than a fraction of the value they actually bring to the company, and thus can get away with huge profits.
To illustrate this with an extreme scenario, assume that all of Apple's work relied on a single engineer's designs. If Google and Apple were to compete on who can hire that engineer, Apple would be willing to pay almost all the way up to their entire revenue to that single engineer, as in this contrived scenario, if they lose him, they lose all of their revenue. So, Google and Apple would be racing to the bottom, offering ever more extravagant salaries to this magical engineer until they couldn't pay him and make a profit at all anymore.
The thing is the idealised situation never actually exists. Let's say a developer builds a product that brings in $10m a year. How much do you pay them? You need to factor in that actually 10 designers, artists and product managers also contributed to the design and functioning of the product. Then there's the 5 people in IT support, 2 in QA, 3 in customer support, the office staff and security, the finance people, payroll, marketing, distribution, etc. Maybe it actually costs $7m a year to run all of that.
So you pay them $3m a year? Now there's zero profit, so nothing to invest in expanding the team, improving your services services, hiring more developers, growing the businesses, funding new projects for that developer and all the other employees to work on. Oh, by the way you owe $20m to your investors that put down the capital to get the business off the ground in the first place. How are you going to pay them back? Also, maybe you could have hired another developer and they might have done just as good a job, which is also true of everyone else in the business.
Finally, if you do up the pay of the developer say $1m a year, what happens if the product gets eclipsed in the market or the developer moves on to another product nowhere near as profitable. Now they're working on something bringing in a lot less, but they're still costing you a million a year.
Man, I hope some six-figure Bolsheviks read this comment and think about it. It's really not as simple as people like to think to try and pay you workers millions
Even Facebook has had to lay people off when the market demand for $500k genius coders cooled a little recently
FAANG salaries and RSUs are pretty much the perfect compromise between labor and capital IMO. The only way I'd change things would be to move toward fewer hours per week, possibly with widespread fixed-bid consulting and health benefits not tied to employment
In microeconomics, one of the consequences of the long-run equilibrium is that no company in the industry has any profit. Sure, it's just a theory that doesn't capture everything but it's often referenced for such cases.
I think it's actually worse than that for the companies, in particular it can easily be a race to negative profits for all companies involved. For example, imagine two competing bridges over a river, where the total revenue available is $100. Each bridge is built of 50 bricks, which collect salary and are free to work for whichever bridge gives them the better offer. The maximum salary that's sustainable if the bridges make a profit is $1 per brick, but it's worth offering vastly more than $1 to "bribe" any particular brick from the other bridge to defect since doing so causes your only competitor to fall down. Similarly, your competitor should rationally be willing to counter-offer up to their entire profit to any single brick to prevent that from happening. Subject to some assumptions about how negotiations work, this can result in both bridges being really far in the red, since the total value of the bridge/team is worth less than the sum of the costs of each individual brick/member departing. The decision theory concept of a "dollar auction" has some similar pathological behaviors.
Obviously, software engineering teams aren't as dramatically interdependent as a bridge where the departure of any one member causes the entire structure to collapse, but they also don't live in the perfect balance where the value of the whole exactly equals the sum of the marginal value/cost of each member. As a result, there's no one number for the "value" of an individual engineer that both represents their negotiated wage and is viable for the company to pay without going bankrupt.
When I read the original question, I thought that yes - he was essentially a bully, but he probably didn't think of himself as one. But that smiley face - he must have felt at least somewhat like a bully just then.
There’s a bit of a “gentlemen’s agreement” around poaching in a lot of industries. It’s not uncommon for execs to scold each other over it. Nobody wants to start a poaching war so there’s incentive to be polite on both sides.
It's awful that there is collusion between companies to prevent these workers from getting compensation based on actual market forces. If they care so much about poaching then they need compensation that strongly rewards tenure and pays enough that they won't be tempted to leave. I don't know if this behavior is illegal but I feel like it should be.
The fact that his own company fired him just shows how bad of a bully he is. The power probably went to his head when he got there, I'd like to see how he gets bullied by someone tbh.
I think it’s simpler than that. He was an average person. Had a lot of business acumen, particularly well timed vision (after a bunch of poor timing), then he was a really successful guy who was just as flawed as the rest of us.
I think I understand your larger point, but whatever corrections or amendments need to be made to the myth of Jobs, the idea that he was in any way average shouldn’t be one.
The dude basically chose to die of treatable cancer in his 50s because he just didn't like the idea of getting medical treatment. That's one of the most odd behaviors I've ever heard of.
Plenty of incredibly smart people think and do incredibly stupid things.
Isaac Newton was one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of history, inventor of the telescope, father of Newtonian mechanics, and a key figure of the Enlightenment. Yet he considered that scientific work of lesser importance, spending much of his effort studying the occult, biblical interpretation, and alchemy.
> Plenty of incredibly smart people think and do incredibly stupid things.
I mentioned this on an Elon thread and an SBF thread, and it fits here also. When people are so rich and powerful, it's often their own hubris that takes them down.
Stupid is the word I would use for discovering that you have pancreatic cancer and then believing the best course of action is to reject effective medical treatment and "cure" it with an all-carrot diet.
Stupid is the word I would use to posthumously describe the interests of Isaac Newton. I admit that it would have been difficult to recognise the stupidity of occult studies in 18th century England, but we can certainly apply that label with the benefit of a modern perspective.
>Stupid is the word I would use to posthumously describe the interests of Isaac Newton. I admit that it would have been difficult to recognise the stupidity of occult studies in 18th century England, but we can certainly apply that label with the benefit of a modern perspective.
It seemed to work for Jack Parsons. And many other very creative people.
Or maybe our conscious and unconscious brains don't work in linear fashion like factories. Inspiration matters. It doesn't matter if what it takes to inspire one, consciously or subconsciously, is weird and doesn't make logical sense but is more poetic.
I would agree that it was stupid for Musk to buy Twitter at any price.
But 44 billion wasn't an unreasonable price at the time the amount was offered, which was immediately prior to the stock market collapse of early 2022. And most of the TSLA stock he sold to acquire Twitter was sold at near to its market peak. Effectively he swapped some overpriced TSLA for some overpriced TWTR.
That’s one of the most human and common behaviors I can think of, and one of the ones I find most humanizing about him as a person who’s so caricatured. He was this giant, right? Saw the future of so many things others couldn’t see, yeah? And his own health suffered because he couldn’t meet the present facts of it with any kind of realistic acceptance. That’s just… some guy, could be any one of my family or someone you know. He was a flawed, normal, person, with… a story which is why we’re discussing it.
In terms of him being a bully? He was pretty average a person. That’s the only point. Just a normal run of the mill jerk, maybe a bit eccentric about it, but could’ve been dozens of people I knew growing up. Whatever other life accomplishments don’t make him a remarkable jerk. Just a well known one.
It’s amazing to me what is being read into “average” here. I mean he was mere mortal, flaws and all. No better than John Lennon, who was also historically remarkable, and similarly a shitty dad.
Just sit in public and you'll see parents threaten and humiliate children for the smallest things. It's baffling. The effects of these actions add up and we call it "mental illness".
Not to mention how many parents think assault (smacking) is a "just punishment". It actually achieves the opposite of what it purports, i.e. more violence and disobedience as soon as the children grow large enough to hit back.
And then there is the peculiar acceptance in the USA of male genital mutilation for many non-Jewish children.
Depends how you define "bad". High-functioning people with abusive childhoods tend to perform quite well under capitalism. Low-functioning victims of childhood abuse end up in prison.
Could you please stop posting ideological battle comments to HN? They're tedious and not what this site is for, regardless of which flavor you favor.
This is not a comment on the topic at hand—I'm just noticing that you've been posting a lot like this lately, and it's been a problem for a long while as well. You're clearly using HN primarily for ideological battle, and are way over the line at which we ban accounts—see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for past explanations. I don't want to ban you, because you've also posted good things, but if you keep doing this we're going to have to.
Curious conversation and ideological battle are incompatible. Therefore we have to pick one. We pick curious conversation.
Thanks for the fair warning. I've accounted for your past warnings. I see popular discussion that appear as ideologically informed as my own, yet slide by as status quo positions, which motivated me to add balance to conversation. However I now understand your policy on taking ideological stances too frequently (even if other frequent ideologues don't appear so due to status quo positions). I'll heed this.
He was just a capitalist. That's how capitalism works, by definition, i.e. extracting the most surplus-value from the workers (in this case the Apple employees). Increased their salaries (i.e. making a "better offer") would have decreased the surplus-value extracted by Jobs, hence why he was angry.
It's deeper than capitalism, power-acquisition is such a fundamental part of agents that it's part of the problem space for "how do we pre-emptively prevent an AI dystopia?"
Capitalism is[0] "huh, even greedy people can be useful, because their greed is best served by supplying other people's needs".
[0] or, I should say, some forms of it are, because Laissez-faire died with the New Deal as hard and for the same reasons as USSR-style Communism (the economic system not the dictatorship)
His job is to create an environment where Apple makes a lot of money. If strategically important employees go from Apple to Google, Apple is quite likely to make less money.
From that point on the game theory is fairly obvious and the rest is a question of style. May as well get angry; sometimes it works. It isn't optimum behaviour but at that level it'll be quite common. There aren't a lot of strategies to choose from. Call it bullying if you like, but realistically once this sort of money is involved something different is happening to what goes on in playgrounds. These people are well insulated from any emotional consequences or threats to their comfort. For a label like 'bully' what matters is how Jobs treated people he had actual power over.
These are funny, and their humor should be treated of how evidence of malfeasance really reveals itself: not in smoke-filled rooms, but silly emails between CEOs beefing over a talented employee.
Given the millions of dollars in damages these emails caused, I'm pretty sure they went back to unsubpoenable smoke filled rooms, minus the smoke. Hell, the CEO of Twitter flew especially to Apple HQ to get their advertising spend reinstated. He wouldn't have done that if whatever he needed to say could've been said over email.
>He wouldn't have done that if whatever he needed to say could've been said over email.
No, this is likely not the reason in this particular case. If email were a replacement for face to fact negotiation, sales people would have stopped taking flights 25 years. Instead, sales at the b2b level is still filled with travel and relationship building.
Humans like humans showing up in person and to blow smoke up their ass. They don’t say that but it’s what they really like and they respond to it in the form of being less ruthless when it comes to cutting ties, etc.
>Humans like humans showing up in person and to blow smoke up their ass
Humans also like that in person meeting to be a swanky ski village for them and their WaGs. Or some resort at an exotic beach location. Or some high end club. Or some other type of payola type of arrangement. Those are kind of hard to do over email
I suspect corporate collusion (and a fair amount of arranging corrupt mutual back-scratching for purely personal gain) like this is the bulk of the nefarious activity that actually goes on at all those various weird secret rich-people club meetings/getaways that are in fact real things and often serve as fodder for various far-wilder conspiracy theories.
Suspect? This is literally what Country Clubs are for.
Ever work on a project for the C-suite that had a lot of urgency, some strange amount of substance and a huge amount of bs that resulted in some huge action/deal but when you sit back and think about it nothing really of value was made?
Yeah you just worked on the coverup for the country club deal that got made weeks ago.
FWIW, this is the one good thing about loss of privacy and people actually tracking private jet movements of the really wealthy that those are a little bit harder to hide. Not impossible. Just harder.
It doesn't appear to be. The email's intention appears to be accusing Google of poaching browser developers to build a competing browser to Safari. It's less about price and more about Apple changing their strategy if they conclude that a company they think is a partner has designs on competing directly with one of their key application offerings.
Which, of course, they eventually did.
If anything, I take this email to be indicative of how companies can lose sight of the effect on their actual employees of market strategization. Jobs isn't worried about having to pay his team more here; he's worried that he's about to see the world's largest online advertiser launch a browser that could cut Apple's control of their users' online experience out from under them. If anything, I don't think they're really thinking about how much people need to get paid (which is, indeed, a problem).
I feel like this is very close to saying.. "well, it was a felony, but they were very incompetent at committing it." Which, for people operating at their level of the industry, is damning either way.
None of this is to absolve them of responsibility. I mean it rather as a cautionary for anyone in this kind of decision-making: don't lose sight of the people in the story while you're strategizing on long-term business plans and business partnerships.
> It's less about price and more about Apple changing their strategy if they conclude that a company they think is a partner has designs on competing directly with one of their key application offerings.
Interesting that this pivots from an antitrust problem related to employers to an antitrust problem related to the browser market. Artificially binding negotiations of one market to another to prevent competition is bad too.
they were convicted of illegal wage suppression as a result of this.
fighting poaching through collusion is functionally equivalent to wage suppression. you're mythologizing. these are billionaire businessmen, they fully grasp the intent and result of their actions. wage suppression is the whole game whether legal or illegally played. that's their profit.
No disagreement that was the end effect. What I'm saying is it's interesting to observe how easy would be to slip from strategization to "oops we are illegally suppressing wages" without that being the intent.
What apple is seeing here is a company they believe to be a partner pulling key staff away from an extremely important project to them (Jobs took the success of Safari very personally), which they didn't anticipate because that's a partner harming them on what they believe to be a shared goal. It's like "dudes... You want Safari to succeed too. Why are you pulling away the staff that would make it succeed?" Which is why I suspect he jumps to the conclusion that Google is working on a competing browser, not the Google is simply following recommendation chains and executing their standard strategy of hiring the smartest people in the room.
At the time, Google was the default search engine for Safari. Apple could have changed their opinion on that.
Google was also trying very hard to build and maintain a coalition of smaller browsers (at the time) that can compete with IE's complete stranglehold on the technical web ecosystem by virtue of its sheer mass. Apple is a notoriously fickle partner in any kind of technical coalition (note how they got bored with other companies dragging their heels on the usb-c standard and released their own standard several years earlier). They had the leverage of both their own browser and their mobile phone platform to position against Google or towards Microsoft if they chose to.
Meh, even without the mobile platform, which they didn’t have in 2005, there were no good alternatives to Google search then and switching the default to something else would have hurt Safari more than Google. My money is on the bidding war.
Don't underestimate Jobs's willingness to be a petty asshole. At that time, Yahoo was still in play and Apple could even have been willing to back MSN.
History might have played out very differently if most search traffic from the Apple platform was going through MSN instead of Google.
Aim? Eventual consequence, yes, most likely, but only as a secondary effect. Eric and co., down to the Maps leadership, were on the receiving end of similar outbursts pretty regularly. It wasn't just about hiring. Sometimes it was about patents, like the pinch to zoom one, which actually existed only in Jobs' fantastic tales. Sometimes it was about YouTube. Sometimes it was about Maps features that he wanted Google to implement (and then attempt to patent for himself). Or it was about Android, which eventually became the straw that broke the camel's back: he threatened war in these 2005 mails and did follow through with the iPhone patent battles. Pretty much everything was a zero sum game, in his book. As someone (RIP) said, dealing with him was like dealing with Khrushchev, minus the shoes.
Anyway, most of the above have little to do directly with wages and a lot to do with pride, bullying, control and/or things that smell a lot like narcissistic injuries (see also former presidents and current tech CEOs prone to meltdowns). I'm not a psychologist or play one, though, so take that with a grain of salt.
Eric and co. simply appeased him way too often. They did push back and occasionally even troll him (like the night before the Nexus One launch), but nowhere enough. If only they had penned a reply like Palm's.
I think it's purely a strategic tech stance. Google building an at least on-par browser competing with safari was not good for apple, and the faster way to achieve that for google was to poach engineers, especially that the iPhone was probably in the pipes at this time.
For engineer, compensation is not everything, regardless of money, going to google to build a browser would easily look like a good idea at the time.
I disagree, this seems unethical at best, from both sides of the aisle.
> So a compromise would be to continue with the offer we have made (to [REDACTED]) but not to make offers to any of the others unless they get permission from Apple.
This right here should be illegal. Where one chose to work should be 100% on your own accord. That a employer I want to work for/wants me to work for them would collude with my current employer to not hire me based on the whims of the CEO seems like a bad outcome for everyone, including the employer which would "retain" me.
> On May 23, 2014, Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe agreed to settle for $324.5 million.
> ..
> In June 2014, Judge Lucy Koh expressed concern that the settlement may not be a good one for the plaintiffs. Michael Devine, one of the plaintiffs, said the settlement is unjust. In a letter he wrote to the judge he said the settlement represents only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000 workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded.
No, that was dishonest math. He aggregated ALL TOTAL comp for POTENTIAL employees based upon a BEST-CASE compensation for ALL of them.
...and none of that is realistic. The correct estimate would be the INCREMENTAL comp for the portion of employees that ACTUALLY looked for work with the competitors.
Never blindly trust one-side of the story in a damages lawsuit.
> I suspect the fines exceed the salaries the employees were 'owed'
Maybe to the specific candidates affected, but this would also have had a stifling effect on compensation across the industry too (and the resulting growth would have lasted for years). This kind of subtle wage fixing pays off in spades.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think the industry benefits from people bouncing between FAANGs. They have a massively distorted view of the world and that creates massively distorted engineers who have lost the capacity to think about solving a problem for 100,000 people instead of four billion. That’s four and a half orders of magnitude off.
The perverse incentive with the anti poaching collusion is to move from FAANG to a startup. Where you are confronted by problems involving 50 servers instead of a million. Normal problems.
Most of the web developer world cared about an alternative, just ask any older FE developer after screaming iiiieeeee (6) when their pages failed to render to published standards in it.
For what it's worth, the moment I read the letter I also pretty much assumed it had to be Dave Hyatt. (Source: worked at Mozilla from 2009 to 2020; Silicon Valley browser dev is a fairly small world.)
Hyatt never worked for Google—he's still at Apple as far as I know. Might be that Google ultimately retracted their offer, but knowing Steve, Hyatt would probably not have remained at Apple no matter what happened.
I don't have any inside info here, but I'd be willing to bet Darin Adler was one of those other REDACTEDs. He was an early Safari guy, as well as tech lead for Mac OS 7 and worked at General Magic, so Google would probably have been pretty happy to get their hands on him.
I still think the main one was Dave Hyatt. Ben Goodger (referenced in those emails) worked on V0.6 of Firefox that Dave started. Ben was founding team at chrome just before these emails (see his LinkedIn for dates). Dave was instrumental on WebKit for Safiri. Chrome picked WebKit too. Dave was also that good and was well known to Steve.
I also think parakey was the startup referenced as his other option (Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt)
Hyatt was honestly the first name that came to my mind, and in fact I had to look him up to be certain that he didn't move to Google. I guess I assumed that if it was Hyatt, he'd no longer be at Apple, since it sounded like the person in question wanted to leave, but who knows—maybe Apple got him to stay?
Steve Jobs was obsessed with loyalty, so I figured that anyone applying for a job at Google would be dead to Apple as long as Jobs was there. Hyatt was one of these guys who even Jobs would probably have hesitated to blacklist, though, so maybe it really is him they're referring to here, and he ultimately remained with Apple.
Steve probably needed this team for iPhone Safari. That could explain why he was so pissed. Perhaps just showing them the iOS plans and a some extra stock was enough. Perhaps Google pulled the offer. Perhaps both.
Here’s some nuance: anyone so talented they warrant legal action over a fight to employ them already knows they’re very talented. Being their stakes in a war over strategic business goals isn’t more affirming, it’s almost certainly less. It’s (almost invariably) not cool to be someone else’s meat. Even if you know you’re very highly valued meat, and even if they affirm that your value as meat is very high indeed.
I'm sure they can comfort themselves on the quarter to half a million annual they were being paid instead of the half a million to three quarters of a million a zero collusion market would have offered them. ;)
“Got table scraps; good table scraps, could’ve been better mind you, not especially great; enriched a few.” There, I think I know what to put in my will as how I will wish to be remembered.
>“Got table scraps; good table scraps, could’ve been better mind you, not especially great; enriched a few.” There, I think I know what to put in my will as how I will wish to be remembered.
I realize we are on a forum/platform that is home to a disproportionately high number of wealthier individuals, but are you actually suggesting that $250 million annually is "table scraps"?
... which still isn't table scraps. median income in the US is $30k.
I am a software engineer, but even I have a hard time finding deep sympathy for people complaining that they are making 10x the median salary but they should have made 20x.
Call me old-fashioned, but at the end of the day in our industry, what's "fair" is what you agreed to. None of the people in the cold-calling scandal were forbidden from making overtures to the competing companies or being hired by them. And it's real hard for me to dredge up feelings of injustice for the embarrassed sub-millionaire when so many are forced to figure out how to live on 1/10th of that money.
If you don't like your Google salary, just put your resume in at Apple. That's my advice.
Ah crap, that's what I get for posting in the middle of the night while wide awake and sick. Thanks for the correction, and agreed - the difference between $250 million and $250k doesn't change my point.
I’m sure that redacted employee made bank but I doubt they truly got compensated for the value they created for these obscene companies , in part due to these bs negotiations.
It’s an honor to be suppressed by C-levels in two giant corporations! It isn’t fawning over the people who systematically deny me seeking value for my talent, I’m privileged to have both of them fuck me simultaneously!
You’re still missing the forest for the trees. It’s unrealistic for execs in companies that size to even take a cursory review of why each individual person left the company (and they would be incompetently wasting their time if they did).
Anything that involves the attention enough to warrant actual emails makes that employee extraordinary. This is the same whether the outcome is negative or positive.
This is interesting to read from the angle of personality dynamics.
People underestimate the sense of control that Jobs derived, not from being prophetic or smart, but from making things extremely personal and psychologically stifling for other people. (Musk works in the same way when he gets flustered or fearful.)
Jobs talked a lot about seeing the future, but his high-use "like/dislike switch" was really in control most of the time. It's a very emotional way of being.
Notice that Brin immediately metabolizes that type of communication as A-OK, and understandable:
> he made various veiled threats too though i am not inclined to hold them against him too much
> as he seemed beside himself (as eric would say).
This particular response shows off a strength which, while impressive in patience, openness to relationship dynamics, etc. is also in some respects similar to the type of person who stays in cults while all of their friends call it quits.
Brin likely sees his own strength in nuanced understanding rather than in control-focused decisiveness. It's a logical yin to Steve's yang. I wouldn't be surprised if he saw Steve as a promising or up-and-coming feelings-relater. I.e. "if he could just move past the explosions, which maybe I can help with by talking to him, he could be so expressive and creative" or something like that.
Brin is also a bit lower in conscientiousness and a lowered-boundaries person compared to a lot of techies in leadership, but he's also high-creative, high-expressive personality. This is more of a "therapeutic" type of person in general.
With an angry Steve Jobs in the room, this kind of person will get steamrolled 99% of the time, no matter the tech in question or the negotiation setup.
I believe Brin saw a lot to aspire to in Jobs' _upside_, but shared Jobs' blind spot for diplomacy and truly creative work at a higher level, and was unable to perceive a need to work in that way.
On Jobs' part, he was extremely lucky to grow up in a capitalistic society which sees $$$ as something it's happy to exchange for control of a given domain, along with a legend to go in the books of the great man theory. In terms of group values like leadership, what you'll find is a constant communication of vision backed by a huge amount of emotional control technique which is not quite so dynamic as it is whiny.
Jobs was a poet. A brutal, calculating, ruthless businessman, but ultimately a poet. I have no doubt that every important decision in his life was driven primarily by emotion.
> Jobs was a poet. A brutal, calculating, ruthless businessman, but ultimately a poet. I have no doubt that every important decision in his life was driven primarily by emotion.
No. No he wasn't. Not in the literal or figurative sense. But I get what you're doing in saying that.
Really the Steve Jobs worship is something I'm thankful to see going away day by day.
I’ve heard stories that Google set up development office in Denmark because one of their V8 developers wanted to move home and he was “that good” that it was worth setting up an office just to keep him on staff.
It doesn’t say if “redacted” accepted an offer, so possibly Don Melton, Dave Hyatt, or Ken Kocienda? None of them left Apple until much later, so this is just speculation in descending order of assumed-Stebe-irateness.
These February 2005 emails make for an interesting timeframe since that was the year of the Apple/Google default search engine deal. I can’t find a more exact date for the search deal than “2005”, so it’s possible both were under negotiation simultaneously with no cause/effect relationship, but it sure is an interesting coincidence https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/technology/apple-google-s...
By matching the font with the original screenshot, none of the names fit. "Don Melton" & "Dave Hyatt" are too short, "Ken Kocienda" is too long. "David Hyatt" is pretty close, could be him judging by the emails.
> so please update me on what you know here and on what you think we should have as policy.
> on another note, it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unificaiton strategy that we can get these two to pursue. combined, they certainly have enough marketshare to drive webmasters.
Would be absolutely hilarious if these series of calls and emails led to the development of Chrome
Both Chrome and Safari were based on WebKit (which itself started as a fork of KDE's KHTML and KJS libraries), which a lot of other vendors use too.
Although Chrome eventually diverged years later with the development of Blink, Chrome was the result of a multi-company, industry-wide unification strategy on WebKit, the core of Safari.
>WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE, and has since been further developed by KDE contributors, Apple, Google, Nokia, Bitstream, BlackBerry, Sony, Igalia, and others. WebKit supports macOS, Windows, Linux, and various other Unix-like operating systems. On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome and the Opera web browser, under the name Blink.
What is sort of interesting is this thread (sort of) suggests they might have been looking at the Mozilla renderer at the same time as the Webkit one. I wonder if the licensing (MPL?) would have allowed that fork to happen. That everyone ended up going with Webkit is a bit sad imo.
Mozilla was in no shape to run on mobile or embedded devices (and still isn't afaik), while WebKit ran quite nicely on mobile and embedded devices, thank you.
And as we all know, Android is as important to Google as iOS is to Apple.
So there was really no chance of either of them (or any other of the many companies interested in mobile and embedded devices, like TomTom for example) ever building on top of Mozilla/xulrunner.
> Mozilla was in no shape to run on mobile or embedded devices (and still isn't afaik)
Probably true at the time (anno 2007), but since ~2014, FirefoxOS which is an entire mobile OS based on Gecko (called boot2gecko) I think proves that at least the browser engine (not UI) could be used for more than just simple webpages, and on mobile devices.
The OS itself was relatively fast, but the public perception of the performance of the OS was very low, as most (if not all devices) running FirefoxOS was very low powered compared to the contemporary flagship models for Android and iPhone.
The irony here is that the person was in many parts responsible for creating XPCOM at Mozilla which was a major reason for the bloat, jumped ship to Apple/Safari at the early stages.
I remember a rigorous article where he dissected Mozilla vs Webkit and explained by why the latter was superior (= less abstractions and no XPCOM). I wouldn't be surprised if that article was the basis for the decision to not go with Mozilla at Apple.
Nothing to be held against him for sure, if you have been in this business for this long you are sure to have created stuff that you realize was not optimal. Particularly over-abstractions.
Also I would not be surprised if it is that person they are talking about in the mail conversation.
I had the pleasure of having dinner around 1990, with my team of 6 from Apple, at Steve’s Woodside residence with Steve trying to recruit us into coming to NeXT. One of the team alerted Apple lawyers and Steve started the evening reading a non-poaching letter from Apple’s lawyers to Steve.
That out of the way the dinner was mainly an evening of Steve asking a lot about Apple as it became obvious he still was emotionally invested in the company.
Yes - lawsuits have tremendous overhead, and class actions average out everything.
In this case, it would have been hard to recover more overall as a class in a finite period of time - the values were calculated based on each individuals wages and expected earnings lost at various levels or something like that (it's been a while, sorry).
The judge initially rejected the first settlement (which was 320 million i believe), and considered the final one to be much more reasonable (450 million or something).
This was in front of Judge Koh, who is no slouch and has dealt with lots of complex tech litigation. She is also not viewed as "industry-friendly" in any way, shape, or form (look at the fight over her appointment to the 9th circuit for more details)
If they fought it out in front of a jury, taken it through appeals, etc it would have taken 7-10 years to finalize it, for a max expected improvement of probably 3-5x.
That probably would not be worth it to most people, so settlement seems reasonable.
A particularly injured person may have been able to make out better in arbitration or something, but as a class, no.
This kind of very large, complex case is also just incredibly expensive to litigate.
Instead of looking at the plaintiff side, i'll look at the defendant side (since you don't have to deal with arguing about what reasonable profit margins are). This is just the cost of litigation itself.
The average litigation cost for "major companies" - 50 of the fortune 200's, was 150 million a year each in 2010. It was doubling every 5 years or less before that (it was 60 million in 2005).
It's at least doubled since then. This isn't just tech companies.
On average, "major" (again, fortune X00) corporations in the US spend 0.3% of their revenue on litigation costs. So your 100 billion revenue a year tech company is probably spending 300+ million in litigation costs.
A suit like this is a very large portion of those costs.
The plaintiff lawyers in this particular case were also very good, well regarded complex antitrust lawsuit lawyers. Not the typical "file a thousand class action lawsuits against everything" type firms that you see.
I always felt like it was but apparently there is a real chance of me seeing several hundred dollars over buying the horrible 2018 mac air. Nothing close to the 1800 I shelled out for it which I could never recoup.
I just got an $80 check in the mail over a class action regarding the dishwasher (appliance) I had a few years back that broke long before what should have been it’s usable life. Roughly $1000 to replace it. $80 class action settlement.
Class actions are a crappy way of extracting the actual cost or damages done by a corporation and then getting those damages into tha hands of people that were on the shit side of the stick in the transactions.
But no, I have no grand answer for how to do it any better either.
That is a mostly reasonable comment but has one assumption and another important implication:
1) Assumption: Extended warranties are available for these appliances that would cover the expected usable lifetime of the dishwasher plus the extra purchase 2-3 year warranty.
This assumption is incorrect. Lifespan for something like this would, formally, fall under the category of durable goods. In this case, the expected lifespan of a durable goods such as a dishwasher is 10 years. The manufacture warranty falls well short of that, And a 2 to 3 extension will still not covered that time span. Of course life span of 10 years in this case would assume some potential paid maintenance by the consumer. But would not assume maintenance due to errors that would be significant enough to warrant a class action lawsuit. As such, an extended warranty would not be a sufficient substitution for problems arising from an issue that would warrant a class action lawsuit.
2) Implication: The implication of your comment is that consumers should bear the cost of errors that are sufficient enough to warrant a class action lawsuit, and pay for such errors in the form of an extended warranty.
I disagree with this. It does not seem to be a reasonable expectation as a cost the consumers should bear for systemic defects or negligence. If there’s an issue such that a class action is necessary to remedy for the issue, then a consumer should not be the one bearing the cost of that, even if it was an easy and simple matter of an extra purchase of a few dozen dollars, which as covered in the above assumption #1, would not be sufficient in any case.
All of that aside, as a matter of consumer purchasing and economic implications, I believe that consumers should have a very transparent understanding of the manufacturers warranty presented to them on point of purchase. Options for an extended warranty are nice but not necessarily required. Beyond that though, if there is an issue with a product that should reasonably have been remedied, or something that was deliberately or negligent ignored, the standard terms of the warrantee are moot. Because the manufacturer has not acted and produced a product in good faith, Either by accident or actual knowledge of the issue.
For example, a car may have a warranty that, as a standard from some manufacturers, last five years. That is the duration for which the manufacturer is obligated to correct things that went wrong during the manufacturing process. However, if there was a design flaw, and that design flaw perhaps for example rendered a car useless due to a bug in the software once the clock in the integrated circuit governing the electronic system hit a certain date, that would be a flaw that went into exceeded in terms of customer expectations and rates, boundaries of a standard warranty. We would hope such an issue would be easily rectified by some sort of software upgrade understand the age where those types of things are the norm. But if a manufacturer resisted that type of solution then I think something like a class action would be fully warranted to require the manufacturer to either render the product usable, or compensate the consumer for what might have been the remainder of the cars usable.
Within reason. Cars can be maintained to run for 100 years! But I would not expect the Ford corporation to make good on a design bug found in a model T car designed more than 100 years ago.
Exactly where the balance of time and liability may fall is probably not subject to a specific formula. It depends significantly on the type of good in the nature of the flaw that might be present in the knowledge of the manufacture in terms of how the flaw entered the product. These are not always, and probably almost always not, simple things to determine. This is where class action lawsuits enter the picture to support the collective rights of consumers, where individuals have significantly less power than the corporations producing the goods.
The problem, as I have pretty much stated, is that class action lawsuits are a very poor vehicle for remedying this sort of issue.
I am open to further discussion if you disagree with all or part of this, and may read any response, but I do have some thing of a short attention span and may not necessarily Replying to any response you were right, but I am probably likely to at least read it. Thank you for the discussion.
> 1) Assumption: Extended warranties are available for these appliances that would cover the expected usable lifetime of the dishwasher plus the extra purchase 2-3 year warranty.
No. My assumption was the manufacturer warranty plus the extended warranty should be close to the expected lifespan. I believe 10 years is a stretch for a $500 dishwasher, so 2 years manufacturer warranty + 3 years of extended warranty sounds fair.
> 2) Implication: The implication of your comment is that consumers should bear the cost of errors that are sufficient enough to warrant a class action lawsuit, and pay for such errors in the form of an extended warranty.
Not really. I meant that if $80 buys you your expected lifespan (we disagree on the duration but bear with me) then a $80 refund is fair within the scope of current consumer laws in the US. I'm not saying that it's the best outcome for the consumer.
What happens where I live (Australia) is much better. The manufacturer warranty means zilch, and anything you buy should work for a reasonable lifespan (statutory warranty). If your dishwasher with a 2 year manufacturer warranty breaks after 25 months you simply call the shop and claim your statutory warranty. The "reasonable lifespan" is debatable, but it is longer than the manufacturer warranty in most cases.
> Basically, [Steve] said "if you hire a single one of these people that means war".
what realistically could steve jobs have done here? its not like he had any legal power to prevent his guys going over, and if he wanted to poach from google just to spite google it’d just be a stupidly expensive affair
If you scroll down on the original post, there's another techemail from Palm CEO Ed Colligan to Steve Jobs [0] in which he says: "Threatening Palm with a patent lawsuit in response to a decision by one employee to leave Apple is just out of line."
So, don't know what Jobs could have done with Google specifically, but safe to assume that it would be something else equally out of line.
“Poaching out of spite” is exactly what he’s threatening. And note: “stupidly expensive” for you and me is “stupidly cheap” for companies like Apple and Google.
It's pretty amazing to me that one of the richest people on the planet (at the time anyway) and arguably one of the most successful tech people ever (Sergey Brin) not only did not see anything wrong with putting all of this illegal stuff down in writing, but he's actually unable to use proper capitalization.
Dear management: By the time an employee is interviewing and receiving offers, it's almost always too late. Whatever issue(s) led to their pursuit of other opportunities probably won't be resolved by simply matching an offer and will certainly be exacerbated by trying to torpedo their efforts.
It wasn't really about that one employee (or even the whole team). That is one leader saying to another "don't do this or we'll be force to actually compete on how much we pay employees" (ie "go to war")
... it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unificaiton strategy that we can get these two to pursue. combined, they certainly have enough marketshare to drive webmasters.
--sergey
This line of thought seems somewhat nefarious. I suppose you could say it was just to fight back against msie, but in retrospect it feels like a plan to dominate web development.
Charitably, his thought at the time seems to be that those two vendors could create a viable competitor to Internet Explorer. People forget how much IE dominated the browser market, and how much that hurt the web. Ultimately Google would create its own browser monopoly, but this statement does not seem to refer to that plan unless you read a lot into it.
Creating their own browser was part of the larger picture: unshackling forward development on the web from the whims of a company that saw the browser as a secondary offering behind their operating system and desktop application platforms.
There were a lot of cool ideas in the pipeline (particularly from Mozilla) that were dead in the water if IE didn't buy in. The modern state of the web is partially due to the fact that this kind of backroom dealing finally snapped the market out of IE's hands.
At the time of these emails, getting Apple on board with supporting modern features instead of them deciding, like Microsoft, that the web wasn't important was key to that strategy. The kind of damage Apple could have done would have been to forge their own path or to combine forces with Microsoft in the decision-making bodies about web tech.
- Imagine a world where the value add people got together and horse traded our managers around.
- How realistic even is the “programmer celebrity” anymore? It seems like the “this is the guy” (e.g. one of the best browser guys) happens less anymore. Are there people out there now that are the crème de la crème of k8s configurators? Top class QUIC implementers? Number one ad-tech hackers? It just seems that the things we used to lionize our star developers for were a lot easier to get excited about. It was like we were making a better new world. Now I just feel like a paving stone in a surveillance economy.
Those celebrities only matter for big companies that develop a products that require deep specialisation. Your startup won't need the "crème de la crème of k8s configurator" but Kubernetes team might want to hire a specific developer with some second-to-none knowledge of internal workings of containers.
Wherevever you are, couldn't you just start putting up (initially discreet) blue plaques "Steve Jobs did a wee jobby here", and gradually build up to your tombstone?
When I met him, we were chatting about Stanford, and I mentioned that I really admired that huge radio telescope that you could see around 280 and Page Mill Road in the hills above Stanford.
He looked puzzled and confused, and asked "Which huge radio telescope?"
I was flustered and explained how you couldn't miss it, right by 280 and Page Mill Road, it's out there in a field, its huge, it's enormous, gigantic I tell you, there's no way you can miss it, bla bla bla...
He let me go on and on, describing it, and acted like he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, like I was crazy for hallucinating a gigantic radio telescope that both of us must have passed zillions of times.
Finally he let on and said, "Oh, you mean that SMALL radio telescope???"
"I'm sure you realize the asymmetry in financial resources of our respective companies when you say: 'We'll both just end up paying a lot of lawyers a lot of money'".
>anyhow, i told him we were not building a browser and that to my knowledge we were not systematically going after the safari team in particular. and that we should talk about various opportunities.
i also said i would follow up and check on our recruiting strategies wrt apple and safari. he seemed soothed.
This reminded me of the scene in "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" where Bill Gates reassured Steve that he was not building an operating system and Steve was soothed, only to be extremely enraged later when he found out it was all a lie.
I am always wondering how these recruiter knows that "He is absolutely one of the best in the world at Browser technology" and how to be in this level in any area of expertise.
Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George Steinbrenner (Yankees) and Jonny Tyler (Tyler Chicken) get into an argument over George Costanza and start negotiating a deal.
> on another note, it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unificaiton strategy that we can get these two to pursue. combined, they certainly have enough marketshare to drive webmasters.
Now that was funny. (Google Chrome was release in 2008 BTW. 3 years later.)
Why didn't Brin just ignore Jobs calls and have him put through to a secretary?
Any good call centre worker knows you don't deal with irate people directly as they cannot be reasoned with, and (imho) their aggressive behaviour should not be rewarded.
They had an agreement that they wouldn’t do this. If being ignored the call jobs would hire google employees, especially considering how much of a grudge he holds.
I know Zuckerberg gets a lot of flak nowadays but under his watch Facebook never played the wage suppression game despite ample attempts by others to get him (and thereby FB) to do so.
Ah yes, the at-will employment in the US at work I see.
In this case, Jobs wills it that some people work for him until he's okay with them leaving and throws his toys out the cot when the people in question feel otherwise.
I love how an absolute cunt Steve Jobs was! Mostly because there are so many publicly documented examples of his cuntness that I’m sure are not unique to him but that we seldom find out about other CEOs.
I don't think they're actually trying to suppress wages. It sounds like they're just willing to do whatever it takes to get Steve Jobs to stop yelling at them and not thinking through the consequences.
> We are careful to adhere to non-compete agreements if we have established these with any company.
Hiring non competes do exactly this regardless of whatever benefit of the doubt you wish to grant (not to mention it clearly establishes they’ve done this regularly prior to this so it wasn’t even a one off). More importantly, these were already clearly established case law as illegal in California. So these are California employers talking about non competes for Californian employees. I think “not thinking through the consequences” is secondary here. They’re putting in writing that they’re actively breaking the law regularly and not just in this once instance. Of course details matter here so maybe there’s nuance here or they’ve got good lawyers helping them achieve intent without actively crossing the line, but I’ve always been curious why this was a class action and not prosecuted by the state of California. There’s also this [1]:
> In fact, Colligan, who left the company in June, sounded a little indignant in his refusal.
> “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,” he said, according to the report.
So at least one other CEO said “no thanks and what you’re doing here is likely illegal”.
I had to do quick refresh of Palm history, but it looks like they did not survive, but it does not indicate to what extent Apple may have been involved in it. Still, it is good to see there are some CEOs that were at least willing to say equivalent of 'not cool'.
I joined just before the Pre launch straight out of university so at the time I was still very very green and didn’t have special insights. I think there were three main challenges. The first is we bet wrong on 2 strategic directions: physical keyboards (blinded because of history / Blackberry making us think it was an important market segment that would resist Apple) and screen size (trying to zig and capture value while the market zagged to chase volume). There were knock on effects for sliding keyboards (more complex manufacturing, more RMAs because of defects in the keyboard, higher cost, etc etc). The screen size probably hurt a lot because while most people would love a smaller form factor, the larger screen is more addictive in terms of media consumption, games, large text for older people. Apple made this mistake too btw and lagged a bit the Android competitors that pushed screens yet larger, but they adjusted quick and they had a huge war chest by that time.
It was recoverable and if I recall correctly we had no keyboard prototypes with larger displays floating around but we failed to prioritize that properly / probably limited volume to shift from the Pre design after one year because of the upfront investment we’d have had to have made for the lines. Palm Pixi sacrificed the sliding aspect of the keyboard (typically candy bar) but went with a smaller screen with fight the actual market direction.
The second big factor in the downfall I think was our ads. Verizon totally fucked up our advertising further (positioning the Palm phones as “for moms” in extremely sexist advertisements). I wish I could say this was Verizon’s fault since they actually had control of the co-branded advertisements if I recall correctly. Anyone remembering the travesty of those original Pre ads though will know it was a disaster. Worse - the Jon at an all hands was all gung ho about it. Wasn’t sure if there was just no steering the ship because of budget or something and he was just trying to salvage it, but regardless those ads went out. High concept is fine for an art class. Not for smartphones without any hype and the general public inundated with smartphone = iPhone, android was “that knockoff iPhone”, and Blackberry was “the phone they make me use at work”. No one knew palm and our ads did a poor job articulating that to the general public, especially since we didn’t have the hype machine that iOS did (not that they needed it - they had really top notch pr/marketing/advertising people in the wake of the desktop OS wars and then the iPod rocket ship). Btw, Android failed at countering Apple’s marketing until Sony cracked it many years later: copy Apple almost to the letter in design, create clear descriptive messaging that explains what’s better about your phone (or at least equal), and take away Apple’s “coolness” by commoditizing as much of the phone as possible. This was many years later though.
Side note: a girl I went on a first date with mentioned she loved the Pixi because of the smaller design. Maybe this was just trying to connect with me about my work, but I maybe it was also a missed opportunity on a niche beachhead market segment: second phone for women to put in a clutch for the night out which you could also use as a “phone for your kids”. The second one is particularly valuable but if you want to learn more read about how the companies carefully track how chat and social media apps do with kids and will sacrifice adoption with older generations to protect that - today’s kids are tomorrows yuppies with disposable income.
Finally something went horribly wrong with the Verizon deal. I don’t know what actually happened but it turned out that Palm somehow ended up on the hook for all unsold phone inventory on our books while Verizon forced us to premanufacture a ton (our leadership got overly excited and made too much without thinking through the consequences? Not sure). This was also around the time that Apple had ended their AT&T exclusivity and started shipping on Verizon. Did Apple strongarm Verizon into screwing Palm over in retaliation to this non compete stuff? We certainly were poaching very hard from Apple. Still, even if they did put the nail in the coffin (which I doubt because it just wouldn’t be worth it for the minnow that we were), we were clearly making a lot of missteps on the business front.
WebOS itself was also a technical mistake in a way:
1. Web tech was too early. In particular, we were finding and fixing JIT bugs not only in v8 (dedicated team that if I recall correctly was second to Google at the time in size and far more familiar with V8 ARM), but also the CPU (because QCOM had shitty chips at the time and wasn’t bothering to test cache invalidation of dynamically generated code).
2. Performance of web tech was too immature / CPUs were too slow. We were perceived as being slower than Android which was saying something.
3. While no one bats an eye at react native and electron today, the software ecosystem wasn’t as mature which meant apps in our store weren’t very compelling because they just couldn’t do all that much (and then the native SDK basically capitulated to that for games).
However. I don’t see the technical pieces as fatal mistakes in and of themselves. Given time we would have fixed these, brought down memory usage, etc etc. the technical team was phenomenally strong and we recognized technology gaps early and fixed them by iterating (eg Luna bus 2 got replaced DBus with a proprietary implementation that was waaaay better). Still. When you’re competing with Android and iOS at the time, it wasn’t a great spot to be in. On the other hand we were showing off core OS UIs that only now have started catching up a decade later. And even then, it would be close. So all in all probably more of a correct long term bet at the sacrifice of certain near term performance, but one the company wouldn’t live to see validated.
I don’t think it requires Apple doing much if anything out of the ordinary course of normal competition. I’m sure they were more worried about the impact of Chrome and Android. But who knows. Jobs was known for his anger and I doubt anyone will care because ultimately we ended up being a small player dead by the side of the road along with all the others.
Thank you for all this additional information. It makes sense and I am willing to side with you based on what you wrote.
edit: WebOS ended up being good though ( between touchpad and now LG it is actually my preference ). Can you elaborate on how big a difference it is between now and then ( are they tied by name only )?
I didn't keep track of WebOS after I left Palm when it was acquired by HP. AFAIK there were some OG people still on it and some of the stack was still the same. I met one of the people at a Palm reunion many years later and he was complaining that PBNJSON was still in use. This was a significantly better / faster / more secure C++ JSON library I wrote (both had better test coverage and things like formal schema validation which wasn't a thing at that time for JSON). It was severely delayed in getting open-sourced and then it seems like no one really is invested in updating this part of WebOS, otherwise they would have replaced it with RapidJSON or even better Rust Serde or something like it.
As I said, today it's fine and AFAIK it's also on car infotaintment systems (the ARM ecosystem is way more mature with respect to web / JIT + much better supporting ecosystem). It's less clear to me if they still use a normal Linux ARM kernel or if they've switched to Android. The biggest problem with us not using Android is that Android sucked up all the oxygen and device vendors built Android instead of Linux drivers / provided binary blobs that only worked on Android. This increased costs because those drivers needed to be ported to normal Linux.
However, most (all?) of the really talented designers that pioneered WebOS got snapped up by Google and Apple. So did a lot of senior engineering talent (probably moreso by Google since a lot of them were already ex-Apple and not keen to return).
It's not spoken aloud, but implicit in the conversation is that Apple would rather conspire with a competing firm to make them back off on an offer of higher salary rather than make an above-board counteroffer.
There's no such thing as "poaching" in an honest employment market. Firms are supposed to keep their valued employees by competing.
There’s no guarantee an independent Firefox could have survived “Embrace, Enhance, ???” at all. Maybe this timeline isn’t so bad since Chrome being what it is means there are actual good reasons to choose Mozilla’s Firefox :)
v8 came out in 2008, so this doesn't conflict with that. Though perhaps Sergey was like "if Jobs is really this worried about a browser, maybe we should build a browser". :-)
Is "billionaires not using correct capitalization and punctuation to appear too important" a thing? Elon Musk seems to do the same thing, and it always surprises me.
Good grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and vocabulary are class signifiers. These become pretty irrelevant at the highest echelons of class, and intentionally breaking them starts being a sign of personal style.
> Good grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and vocabulary are class signifiers. These become pretty irrelevant at the highest echelons of class, and intentionally breaking them starts being a sign of personal style.
Over analysis if I’ve ever seen it. Not using capitalization was just a part of 90s Internet culture which both Musk and Brin grew up in.
I grew up in 1990s internet culture, but culture changes and it's now the 2020s. I also no longer ask people for their MSNs or consume much of my content in the medium of Macromedia Flash videos.
> intentionally breaking them starts being a sign of personal style
This sounds more likely for someone as self-absorbed as a tech billionaire.
I have links to this entire saga bookmarked and send them out whenever someone complains about software engineers being overpaid and entitled. At the end of the day they are still the labor class, and just like in any other industry it's the executives/investors/shareholders at these large companies who are enjoying most of the benefits of their work. Even after the poaching lawsuit and settlement practices like non-competes (without garden leave), non-solicitation clauses, salary exempt status, unpaid overtime and unlimited unpaid on-call are all still way too common in software.
What is stopping super duper browser guy from launching his own browser with his own company, reaping all the rewards himself? I really don’t understand your attitude at all.
Are there any independent browser companies? What's the business model? Nobody will pay for a browser. If you work in this area, you need a well funded patron that sees a browser as strategic.
A browser is strategic, hence Steve Jobs getting pissed.
Starting your own company also requires specialist and generalist skills that a browser engineer doesn't have, and exposes him to risk that won't be worth it to a rock star developer.
Did you notice the part where Sergey Brin was intimated by Steve Jobs in the email threatening him with war if he starts a browser? Probably that part.
All this stopped not because of any class action, but one company Meta will not play along with the cabal. Zuck raised the salary so much he started poaching left and right from other tech giants. Google and Apple had no choice but to match the salaries to retain and hire top talent. For all the fault of Meta, they knew the worth of employees and have always tried to give them a good bargain.
Netflix also played a huge role in raising salary bar.
Anecdote: In 2008, I was working at Ericsson in San Jose, as a junior software engineer on edge routers. I was paid ~$140K (bonus + RSU). We heard that very senior engineers were paid around $180K. Cisco was sought after place in our industry (Networking). They would pay ~$225K for senior engineers.
(all numbers are unverified and rumors).
Then one of my peer at Ericsson, a junior engineer, had an offer from Netflix and told during lunch break, his total comp was $250K, all cash (no RSU). I can still remember the gasps that followed.
I have read the book "No Rules Rules. Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention" [0]. It's fascinating the number of times Netflix pivoted and rewrote many rules. They discuss their philosophy on compensation in the book. They played important role in raising the salary bar.
>”So a compromise would be to continue with the offer we have made (to [REDACTED]) but not to make offers to any of the others unless they get permission from Apple.”*
This is just so absolutely shitty behavior. It’s bamazing they were willing to talk about it so openly in email format. You get to be so great at your job only to risk being blackballed by hush hush non compete handshake agreements? Unions don’t go nearly far enough to balance out this power asymmetry. I don’t know what would. Honestly I don’t know what could without knock on effects with their own awful potentials to hamper competition and innovation. Hugely punitive repercussions when this sort of things comes to light might be a step in the right direction though.
I mean, you took it out of context the line before said: I don’t think we should change our hiring policy based on this. The line after said: let’s discuss before you make other offers.
I think the context does not support your response. Because while they may have stated that it shouldn’t change their hiring practices, the rest of the conversation fully indicates that it did or would in fact be a consideration in their future hiring practices. So what they stated as far as hiring practice policy does not match up to what they said their practices might be going forward. There is a mismatch here. I of course do not know from what is presented how that actually played out. Whether or not the hiring practice policy of not changing the policy is what prevailed, or whether or not they did in fact render hiring decisions on the basis of the implied noncompete agreements that may have been made.
This kind of stuff is rampant in all sorts of ways. For example, tech companies regularly discriminate against employees if they think that some customer, vendor, etc would object to the employee and possibly threaten to take their business somewhere else. It results in weird shit like not hiring people from certain countries, competitors, or just people with an alternative lifestyle. Firing for being 'out of the closet' in one way or another also happens, but of course is always covered up with some other excuse (part of what HR is really for).
Rather than think of REDACTED as "labor" it might be more helpful to think of him as a star NBA player. The term "labor" applies more to the players in the D-league.
If you're Steve Ballmer and you want Giannis Antetokounmpo on your team, you can't just call him and offer more money. They have regulations around that.
So it shouldn't be surprising that Jobs & Brin have conversations about REDACTED. If it was an engineer with one year experience working under REDACTED, it wouldn't escalate to that level, at least until Google hired five of them.
Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?