[HN Gopher] Palm's CEO emails Steve Jobs (2007)
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Palm's CEO emails Steve Jobs (2007)
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 199 points
Date : 2024-12-15 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| throwoutway wrote:
| A well-written, thoughtful, and diplomatic response by Ed. I
| wonder if he was a good boss to work for
| xattt wrote:
| In 2007, shortly after Palm announced the Foleo, Peter Rojas of
| Engadget fame posted a "Dear Palm" letter that called for the
| Foleo cancelled [1]. A few days later, Ed had forwarded the
| letter to the executive [2]. A few weeks after that, the Foleo
| was cancelled [3].
|
| He was probably working with the best information that he had,
| but going on the friendly advice of tech journalists may not
| have been the best move. Palm completely missed the boat on the
| netbook market.
|
| Apple has milked Palm-firsts, like gesture-based UI (Pre) and
| mobile device mirroring to a computer (Foleo), since then to
| great success. Oh, what could have been...
|
| [1]https://www.engadget.com/2007-08-21-dear-palm-its-time-
| for-a...
|
| [2]https://web.archive.org/web/20071012033705/http://blog.palm.
| ...
|
| [3]https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/09/palm-abruptly-
| cancel...
| pram wrote:
| I agree with the criticism though, the Foleo looked like some
| kind of internet appliance anachronism straight out of 1998.
| I was fully on board the Palm train too (rip Pre)
| sjm-lbm wrote:
| I don't really know for sure, 2007 was a weird time. The
| iPhone launched that year with obvious deficiencies (no
| apps, no 3G) but managed to evolve into something much
| better quickly enough that it didn't really matter. The
| Foleo was really limited, but I'm not sure that would have
| killed it if they would have gotten subsequent versions
| right.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I don't think we can even reasonably talk about Palm
| circa 2007 and iPhone 2007 in the same sentence.
|
| PalmOS was an aging clusterfuck that was a PDA with
| cellular glommed onto it (and the _good_ Treo's of the
| era ran Windows Mobile, which was better in some ways but
| a ridiculous mess for its own reasons) and the iPhone,
| even without apps or 3G was such a revelation and
| improvement that it single-handedly reshaped not just
| mobile, but personal computing, nearly overnight.
|
| The software the iPhone did have was truly impressive --
| at least for the core feature that really set it apart:
| the web browser.
|
| The capacitive touch screen and the on-screen keyboard
| made mince meat out of every other mobile operating
| system in existence or even in development; Google
| completely changed Android from being a Palm/BlackBerry
| clone to being an iPhone clone as soon as they saw it.
| People were willing to jailbreak and reverse engineer
| their iPhones to run apps on it.
|
| Palm, like most everyone else, was caught completely
| flat-footed. They weren't working on webOS in 2007; their
| next-gen version of Palm OS (the name escapes me) was not
| going to set the world on fire and Windows Mobile (who
| they increasingly had offloaded software duties to) was
| also not doing super well. It took new investors (and
| management changes that included ousting Colligan, who by
| all accounts is a pretty great guy and who did lead Palm
| and Handspring well in different environments) and a
| brand new engineering team for Palm to create webOS, an
| OS that had a lot of promise but was still largely better
| as a tech demo than a finished product, and even with
| insane work, webOS launched 2 years after iPhone and
| couldn't compete on hardware or software.
|
| Foleo, which was from the older era of Palm, never could
| have worked. Ever. Even in a world without iPhone, it's a
| dud. But with iPhone, it's DOA before it even gets to
| production.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| But the Foleo was by all accounts a bad device (when Palm
| enthusiasts were able to use obtain nearly final release
| Foleo's years later, this was vindicated by even the most
| strident of Palm fanboys). The price was ridiculous ($600
| before a $100 introductory rebate) for a thing that also
| required a $400 or $500 phone to work.
|
| It wasn't a netbook at all, it was a thin client for an
| extremely underpowered mobile phone with a very outdated
| operating system.
|
| Ignoring for a moment that the netbook craze was extremely
| short-lived and largely a placeholder for what people really
| wanted (sub $500 laptops), no attempt at any of these sorts
| of companion devices has ever achieved critical mass and Palm
| was right to cancel a product that wouldn't have moved the
| needle. Why Samsung even bothers maintaining DeX mode is
| beyond me.
|
| Another smart phone pioneer that struggled and was never able
| to adequately respond to the iPhone did release their own
| take on the Foleo. It was called the BlackBerry Playbook and
| it was an absolutely terrible tablet and a colossal failure.
|
| Canceling Foleo in 2007 was prudent. It is a shame the post-
| Colligan Palm was never able to find success; webOS had many
| great ideas. But the Palm Foleo was a product that absolutely
| did not need to exist.
| lizzas wrote:
| These are not stream of conciouness emails. Almost certainly
| lawyers reviewed or drafted it, or edited it, or suggested
| edits or he knew how to write a good negotiation email. This
| ain't necessarily how he talks to his team.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| It's not that it was written off the cuff, it's that it holds
| up nearly 20 years later as a measured, ethical response to
| having his company threatened. And this email wouldn't even
| be public if it hadn't been evidence in court proceedings
| lizzas wrote:
| It is strategic. You can only look at it through that lens.
| For an ethical measure of a company or exec: see what a
| company does for the greater good despite it reducing their
| profit.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's a shame capitalism doesn't reward any of that, but instead
| rewards (in the industry he was CEO in) putting product in
| consumer's hands. He stood on principal and his ultimate reward
| for that call (in the absence of any regulatory enforcement
| against what Apple aimed to do here) was iPhone beat out
| PalmPilots.
|
| Oh well.
|
| On the plus side, looks like he's having some success with what
| he's doing now.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, one's customers were his employees and the other was
| the world.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The way he has an impact is over time by praising his
| response for the next generation.
|
| Steve was wrong, America is better when employees are free.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It'd be cool if the mechanisms by which companies are
| rewarded and punished reflected that idea.
|
| Steve's company is now one of the three largest in the US.
| The other one was bought out. The lesson from history seems
| to be "you can have a little illegal non-compete. As a
| treat."
| wmf wrote:
| You make it sound like doing the right thing caused the
| downfall of Palm but I don't think there's any evidence of
| that. Being evil doesn't automatically make your products
| better.
| saghm wrote:
| I think the point is that being evil (especially in illegal
| ways) should be discouraged by society _regardless_ of
| whether it's successful. The issue isn't that this specific
| good guy lost, it's that the bad guy faced no
| repercussions. If this good guy still wouldn't have won,
| there still could have been a different good guy to come
| along.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I mean, they did face repercussions.
|
| The DoJ reached settlements with 8 different companies
| and there was a civil penalty too. Whether the
| repercussions were enough is a valid question, but Jobs
| was dead by the time the civil action was ruled on and on
| medical leave when the DoJ settlement in 2011 took place,
| so it's hard to play a "what if" game here -- especially
| since these lawsuits and DoJ investigations (correctly)
| caused tech companies to have to change their policies.
|
| But Apple's egregious no-poach agreements and collusion
| with other companies to do the same didn't cause Palm's
| collapse. And being able to more easily hire Apple
| employees wouldn't have saved Palm.
| wmf wrote:
| Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel paid a $415M settlement
| for this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
| Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
| oblio wrote:
| That is just cost of business. I like the EU approach but
| the US will never adopt it. Scale the fines up to
| percentages of global revenue. That would definitely
| stifle some of these abuses.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Thoughts and prayers to the 3 people (referenced in the letter)
| who left Apple to work at Palm in 2007.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't think they need any of your prayers, they're likely
| better than all of us combined and better than any person who
| joined Apple later.
| neofrommatrix wrote:
| They made the best decision based on the information they had
| at the time. No need to mock someone based on that.
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| Given the rest of the exchange between Steve and Colligan,
| they might have needed to leave for other reasons too.
| tengbretson wrote:
| How much mockery would you trade to get some 2007 Apple RSOs?
| neofrommatrix wrote:
| Everyone wins when they have the benefit of hindsight.
| ks2048 wrote:
| I wasn't trying to mock them - just a light-hearted joke.
| jeltz wrote:
| So you were mocking them.
| dangus wrote:
| No need for thoughts and prayers, if they worked at Apple as
| engineers at that time and weren't dumb enough to sell their
| shares they are likely multi-millionaires at this point.
| huijzer wrote:
| Well.. history tells that people usually sell shares too
| early. It's hard to not sell if they increased a lot in
| value.
| mingus88 wrote:
| Jobs was evidently pissed to lose those 3 people, so it's safe
| to assume they were very senior folk. They likely were involved
| in the iPhone design to trigger this CEO panic
|
| Imagine having vested stock before the release of the iPhone.
| Imagine getting paid a top dollar package to take your
| experience to a competitor.
|
| Those three people made out like bandits. One could only wish
| to be in their shoes.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| And being thoughtful and considerate got Palm nowhere, while
| Apple has now the largest market cap ever.
| sixothree wrote:
| They pretty much got Sherlocked.
| tkzed49 wrote:
| maybe it's less the diplomacy and more that they were sitting
| on a pile of crusty patents instead of building the iphone
| nickpeterson wrote:
| I think it's easy to forget the palm pre and webos because it
| wasn't a competitor for very long, but to be blunt, it was
| the only decent competitor to the iPhone but in the 2008/2009
| timeframe. Android was awful on launch, blackberry was
| completely behind, Microsoft had a plan that was decent but
| was too late. Palm really was the only real threat in the
| early days. They just didn't have the money to iterate like
| apple (and Google).
| badgersnake wrote:
| There was almost a tablet as well, I think it got pulled
| just before launch, and the inventory got sold off for next
| to nothing.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I'm pretty sure a tablet was released, then scrapped
| sometime in the first month or so after release -
| TouchPad, IIRC? It got no support from HP or Palm. I seem
| to remember a quote from some exec saying something like
| "the market demands a $499 tablet" or something like
| that, and TouchPads weren't selling. But when they were
| discounted to $99 - $149, they sold out instantly. They
| even did a second production run and sold more at $249.
|
| This was a huge missed opportunity for Palm. WebOS was
| _pretty good_ at that time. They needed more software for
| it - this is a perpetual problem for most platforms at
| launch. Seed the market with good hardware, invest in
| developers, and let it churn for more than 2 months
| before killing the whole thing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_TouchPad
| knuckleheadsmif wrote:
| My memory was that it was released and then two weeks
| cancelled when HP decided to close down Palm and sell off
| WebOS. I worked for a short time (6 months) working on
| the tablet setup experience.
|
| And yes, then they were being dumped at fire sell prices
| of $99/149$ depending up the configuration.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| They also, unfortunately, ran into hardware issues. They
| were exploring the novel battery form-factor and storage
| space when lithium chemistry was even less understood than
| it is now; they had a sequence of models with batteries
| that went EOL too quickly, enough to (at best) make them
| seen as unreliable in the consumer space and (at worst)
| seen as trying to put people on an upgrade treadmill (back
| when that was a bad thing, before people understood that
| would actually be Apple's whole model with iPhones).
| 1986 wrote:
| I loved my Palm Pixi.
| lizzas wrote:
| ipod / imacs were key to the turnaround, although yes iPhone
| was a second stage booster.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Apple, like many companies, almost died multiple times. I think
| their success is deserved.
| perihelions wrote:
| Here's the complete (?) exchange between Colligan and Jobs (no
| login wall or linkrot),
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/2013/01/24/steve-jobs-used-patents-...
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Is there a central repository where all these tech emails are
| coming from or are they discovery from disparate court cases?
| azeemba wrote:
| They are different court cases, usually popularized by
| techemails (https://www.techemails.com/)
| pimlottc wrote:
| Note that the quotes in the article are abridged, the full
| emails are in the embedded PDF
| isodev wrote:
| Thanks, this should be the link for the post, instead of the
| xitter paywal.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Steve Jobs asking for a no poaching agreement is not just
| unethical but illegal. His threat about Apple's greater
| financial resources is just so petty and low. It really changes
| my view of him.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| There was a lawsuit about apple, google, intel, and adobe
| agreeing not to poach from one another.
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-
| others-...
| jgerrish wrote:
| Keep in mind that Ed Colligan wrote that email probably with
| the knowledge it would come to light.
|
| Whether it was defensive or offensive, who knows. But the
| points he brings up aren't just critical issues for Palm,
| they're ones with very strong public optics.
|
| Hell, half of them are going over facts Jobs fucking already
| knows, including their Siemens patent portfolio. It's a PR
| release waiting for a lawsuit.
|
| Part of it is just life as an executive in today's culture
| where you know discovery is around the corner.
|
| But part of it is calculated here.
|
| Fuck man, I'm shifting around a few piddly gigabytes today
| just to get some work done.
|
| Can you imagine the costs for corporations for email legal
| compliance? What a sad barrier to entry.
| freitasm wrote:
| And most importantly, no Twitter.
| mtlynch wrote:
| I'm impressed at how principled and unflappable Ed Colligan is in
| his response to Jobs:
|
| > _On the other hand, this is a small space, and it's inevitable
| that we will bump into each other. Threatening Palm with a patent
| lawsuit in response to a decision by one employee to leave Apple
| is just out of line. A lawsuit would not serve either of our
| interests, and will not stop employees from migrating between our
| companies. This is a very exciting time for both of our
| companies, and the market is certainly big enough for both of us.
| We should focus on our respective businesses and not create
| unnecessary distractions._
|
| Compare this to Eric Schmidt's spineless response when Jobs
| complained to him about Google poaching:
|
| > _Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is
| happening? " Schmidt wrote._
|
| > _Google 's staffing director responded that the employee who
| contacted the Apple engineer "will be terminated within the
| hour."_
|
| > _He added: "Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve
| Jobs."_
|
| Then again, Google thrived afterward and happily enjoyed the
| fruits of illegally suppressing wages, while Palm's market share
| plummeted soon after Jobs' threat.
| uniformlyrandom wrote:
| >> illegally suppressing wages
|
| This is spot on - Googlers are notoriously poor.
| neofrommatrix wrote:
| This. This is why companies win.
| wpm wrote:
| High wages doesn't mean they aren't being suppressed
| seizethecheese wrote:
| In fact, the higher the wages the more incentive to
| suppress, right?
| Teever wrote:
| This is the wrong way to look at it.
|
| If the employees of these massive companies who illegally
| suppressed their wages hadn't done so then the companies
| wouldn't be so massive, and the employees would have more
| money and some of them would have had more resources to start
| competitors to the hypothetically less well moneyed giants.
|
| This would have lead to a scenario where there's more
| competition in the market which means more innovation, more
| jobs for other people in tech, and lower prices for
| consumers.
|
| Unfortunately this didn't happen and we're all worse off for
| it.
| oblio wrote:
| What do you think happens to YOUR salary if one big company,
| or ideally many big companies, have to pay very high
| salaries?
|
| I'll give you time to study basic micro economics (supply and
| demand).
| xyst wrote:
| Yet after a massive paper trail, "do not call" lists, and
| "gentlemen's agreements" with C-level executives between not
| just Apple and Google but with a large majority of SV in a
| conspiracy to avoid competition in wages. [1] The only response
| was a civil class action lawsuit. No jail time.
|
| Oh, but we do get to look at their dirty paper trail.
|
| These people will never learn. Protests haven't done jack shit.
| Stock market speculators reward their shitty behavior.
| Government isn't doing their job either due to incompetence, a
| revolving door policy, or politicians using the threats of DOJ
| to get billionaire favors/donations.
|
| The only thing I have seen work? A lone gunman with an axe to
| grind against a corrupt industry, careful planning, a gun, and
| 3 bullets with a message sent directly to the CEO. In the wake
| of that aftermath, healthcare industry was shook. Anthem BC/BS
| withdrew their cap on anesthesia coverage almost immediately.
| [2] Near unification across the board regarding how bad the
| state of healthcare is in USA.
|
| I'm fortunate enough to not be impacted, yet. But seeing the
| increasing disparity between poor/middle class and ultra
| wealthy is disheartening. We are slowly entering a second
| gilded age, if not already a reality for some or most people.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753701/no-poach-
| scandal-...
|
| [2] https://www.npr.org/2024/12/05/nx-s1-5217617/blue-cross-
| blue...
| tptacek wrote:
| What would have happened had Jobs followed through with his
| threat and arranged to have Apple sue Palm? All this stuff would
| have entered the record, right?
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Palm would have countersued with its superior mobile patents.
| I'm sure Apple's attorneys pointed this out to Jobs when he
| went to them after this exchange, which is why he didn't follow
| through.
|
| These emails entered the record following discovery in the wage
| suppression lawsuits.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The thing that strikes me is the disparity in length. I think a
| lot of people don't realize how hard it is to write succinctly.
| Jobs was (is?) probably under-appreciated as a writer.
|
| Colligan was correct such an agreement would be illegal and could
| have just stood on that.
| intuitionist wrote:
| I'm pretty sure these emails are public for exactly that
| reason.
| bluefinity wrote:
| Jobs tries to bully and threaten a smaller company into signing
| an illegal agreement and all you have to say is how great of a
| writer he is because of how few sentences he wrote?
| gsibble wrote:
| Seriously
| vidarh wrote:
| Colligan was putting down what had occurred in writing so that
| the details of what Jobs had said would be a matter of record
| should it come to a lawsuit down the line.
|
| This is a common - and highly useful - strategy if you've just
| been in a meeting where things have been said that you were
| uncomfortable with.
|
| Being succinct would have defeated the purpose.
|
| This is a useful strategy to employ in all kinds of situations.
| A dated note written shortly after the event is going to carry
| more weight than recollection later. An e-mail sent to the
| other party that they have not contested the understanding of
| is going to carry more weight than just a note.
|
| And if, as Jobs did, your other side responds, you now have
| ammunition for any future lawsuits.
|
| EDIT: Creating a paper trail is a method to take note of in
| other contexts too. Your manager at work asked you to do
| something unethical? Summarise your understanding of the
| conversation in writing and ask if you understood it correctly
| (a lot of the time, the request will magically become a
| misunderstanding).
| adastra22 wrote:
| Did we read the same emails? The Jobs email felt like a
| toddler's emotional response, whereas Ed's was thoughtful,
| considered, while still sufficiently short and to the point.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Ed's was way too long for the job it needed to do.
| neilv wrote:
| > _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._
|
| Said in email, from one CEO to another, is this obviously
| intentional paper trail?
|
| > _Threatening Palm with a patent lawsuit in response to a
| decision by one employee to leave is just out of line._
|
| Did that patent lawsuit happen? (And if it did, did this email,
| which suggested illegal activity, come up in discovery.)
| lelandfe wrote:
| This is high level chess, I am certain that Jobs read that as
| the opening legal salvo it is. That's a bigger threat left
| implied, and the smaller one was made plain (patents).
| adastra22 wrote:
| No, Apple ended up licensing the patents (Jobs bluster was BS):
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-pays-10m-to-li...
| allenu wrote:
| That is quite amusing, but $10M is peanuts to Apple for some
| necessary patent licenses.
| saghm wrote:
| It might not have been fully BS; as the parent commenter
| mentions, having a paper trail might have been an intentional
| strategy to try to discourage Jobs from going forward with
| it.
| cyberax wrote:
| Palm... Or "how to blow your lead by wasting half a decade doing
| nothing".
|
| I _loved_ my Palm Treo 600, that was released 5 freaking years
| before the first iPhone. It had everything I needed, but the OS
| felt anachronistic even in 2003.
|
| So I was eagerly awaiting for Palm OS 6 to come, so I could
| upgrade. And waiting. And waiting. And then Palm died.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| Same. I did really like webos when it was finally released, I
| got one of those HP touchpad and happily used it. But it was
| too little, too late.
| Nevermark wrote:
| I was so frustrated. The number of times companies take the
| lead then sit on their lead until it dies has often bothered me
| deeply!
|
| The downside to being a passionate customer & engineer.
|
| --
|
| I felt similarly with Netscape. If Navigator had been
| consistently both web browser and editor, it would have been a
| better product, a real service in keeping the web a two way
| tool for most people.
|
| Tim Berners-Lee's vision tied creation & browsing together,
| which is why the web happened at all.
|
| Staying true to that would have produced more value, and
| maintained enough (constructive) lock in for Netscape to keep
| innovating in a way that mattered.
|
| Instead they announced their imagined threat to Windows, before
| that threat was realistic, then drowned in Microsoft's
| response. And the disparity in their emphasis on browsing vs.
| creation left a big hole in the side of their boat, leaving
| them extremely vulnerable to browser competitors.
|
| Microsoft was convicted in court for product tying & other over
| anti-competitive behavior.
|
| But Netscape was convicted in the market for not fulfilling the
| full circle value of the web they were pioneering. They
| commoditized themselves. And the web has never recovered from
| the unnecessary creation/browsing dichotomy.
|
| I was so mad at them! (Laughing tears emoji)
| ndiddy wrote:
| Palm didn't have anything to do with Palm OS 6, they spun off
| Palm OS development to a company called PalmSource (later
| ACCESS). Palm OS 6 was finished around 2004, but never shipped
| on a device because the performance was horrible compared to
| Palm OS 5. This was due to poor software architecture.
| PalmSource threw out the kernel used by previous versions of
| Palm OS and replaced it with a microkernel that focused on
| message-passing between processes. Most of the Palm OS API got
| re-implemented using IPC. This meant that each API call would
| require at least two context switches, more if the API
| implementation needed to make another API call that was
| implemented with IPC. The ARM chips that were available at that
| point flushed their caches on each context switch. The result
| was that doing something like opening an address book with
| around a thousand entries went from taking a few hundred ms to
| taking seconds, as displaying each entry required an IPC call
| to the service responsible for handling contacts data.
|
| It's definitely a shame, as Palm OS 5 is a stopgap OS that got
| shipped on devices way after the point it became obsolete.
| Third-party developers couldn't even write native ARM software,
| they had to compile for 68k and add small chunks of ARM code
| for performance intensive areas where the 68k->ARM emulation
| became a bottleneck.
| deanCommie wrote:
| But...literally part of the explanation is this email and what
| it represents?
|
| Apple participated in an illegal anti-competitive anti-worker
| chilling of the market.
|
| If they hadn't, perhaps some of the people that worked on
| iPhone over the next decade might have joined Palm, and
| improved it.
|
| Instead, Apple retained them and artificially deflated their
| wages at the same time.
|
| Don't get me wrong, Palm is still more to blame. But...there's
| a reason Jobs perpetuated this policy. He knew the value one or
| two key people can make in changing the entire history of
| product and technology.
| yummybear wrote:
| These are some of the richest people debating whether to stop
| people from seeking to work elsewhere. Absolutely despicable.
| Hat's off to Palm for seeking the reasonably route.
| mullingitover wrote:
| This spells out in black and white that Jobs was a pretty
| shameless crook. We already knew this based on Apple and its
| peers getting caught colluding to wage fix, and the settlement
| that came from this, but this is a great reminder.
|
| I really feel like Jobs gets too much credit. He was smart, but
| he also rode on the shoulders of multiple giants in his career,
| and he got lucky several times. The cult of Jobs was convinced
| that Apple would go downhill in his absence, but the company has
| quantifiably done wildly better since Cook took over.
| yapyap wrote:
| I agree on the premise of Jobs being overrated, Apple was the
| classic right spot right time company and that is not to say he
| was not a good leader in that situation but that _is_ to say
| that Apple could just as well have succeeded under a different
| leader with different antics.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| It sure takes an awful lot of hard work to be in the right
| place at the right time. Foolish, both of you.
|
| Vision matters and Jobs had one. If it were all just
| meaningless fate, really there's no reason to get out of bed
| or even comment on HN.
| ericd wrote:
| Who would it have succeeded as well with? Because they tried
| hiring a few CEOs, and far from succeeding, they were very
| nearly bankrupt. After bringing him back, they worked their
| way to being the most valuable public company. He's one of
| the clearest examples of the value of a good CEO.
| mullingitover wrote:
| We remember the comeback, but we forget that he was kicked
| out of the company because he nearly ran it into the ground
| when he was in charge. You can't put all the blame on the
| CEOs who followed him for failing to clean up the mess he
| created in the first place any more than you can give him
| all the credit for the company's performance long after he
| departed.
|
| Furthermore, he was only brought back with a turnaround
| plan that was created up in no small part by his financial
| backers, and the C-suite he arrived with included Tim Cook.
| I'm convinced Cook's housecleaning on their supply chain
| and product lines was what actually saved the company. They
| might've delayed bankruptcy with a hit like the iMac, but
| only for a short while.
| greenthrow wrote:
| We are now in the midst of a multi-year, industry wide wage
| fixing effort. I hope people speak with as much fervor about
| the CEOs currently trying to suppress wages as they do about
| Jobs.
| paganel wrote:
| I'm not from SV, but are you talking about the companies from
| down there? And if yes, I suppose it includes some of the
| FAANGs.
| mullingitover wrote:
| This difference this time is that they learned their lesson.
| Not the lesson of not engaging in corrupt business practices,
| but not to get caught: there's likely a Signal group chat
| they use with burner phones. Arguably the best piece of
| evidence against Jobs mental acuity was the fact that he just
| openly engaging in a criminal conspiracy using the company's
| email servers.
| breadwinner wrote:
| > _the company has quantifiably done wildly better since Cook
| took over_
|
| How much of that is because the company moved along the winning
| trajectory already set by Steve Jobs?
| paulpauper wrote:
| who hasn't ridden on shoulders of giants
|
| _but the company has quantifiably done wildly better since
| Cook took over._
|
| due to all the stuff mr. jobs had done.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > The cult of Jobs was convinced that Apple would go downhill
| in his absence
|
| This claim is about as useful as saying "All HN users think X."
| Nevermark wrote:
| I feel like there is a strong tendency to average out people's
| contributions.
|
| Your comment is on the milder scale, so this is only
| tangentially a response to you.
|
| --
|
| With highly related choices, it can make sense to add & cancel
| moral choices. Good & bad behavior are like positives &
| negatives.
|
| But life and incidents are not simple sums. Relations between
| choices & their outcomes are highly nonlinear. They can have
| thresholds, be multiplicative, exponential, roots or
| logarithmic relations.
|
| Choices & their outcomes rarely simply add or cancel.
|
| Jobs was an incredibly prolific innovator whose personal
| characteristics often translated to important advances in the
| quality of computing, independent of the general industry's
| shared march of compounding quantity/efficiency of computing.
|
| No amount of moral lapses not on that scale cancel any of that.
|
| At the same time, his positive contributions, no matter how
| large, don't cancel out his poor behaviors.
|
| Like a polynomial, or more complicated algebraic or calculus
| expressions, it takes several "numbers" to characterize human
| being's contributions.
|
| --
|
| The worst cases of overly reductive thinking happen in
| politics. The prevalence of judging people and peoples'
| behaviors as simply net positive or negative, and their
| opponents as simply the other sign is endemic.
|
| The result creates hard high-contrast divisions in ideologies &
| loyalties that don't reflect reality much at all.
|
| But over reduction also appears to be a common reflex when
| judging innovators.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > shameless crook
|
| Over a decade after his death, there is plenty of observable,
| egregious shamelessness and brigandry in the world. Jobs was a
| successful player in a big, bruising corporate world.
|
| Jobs was ruthless in business and cruel in some personal
| relationships. But he had skills and talent too. Apple wouldn't
| exist today without his leadership through a critical juncture.
| He was also a driving force for _usability_ in products.
|
| Notice how no one seems to promote usability anymore. (We do
| however pay lip-service to _sustainability_.)
|
| I never liked the cult of idolatry that developed around the
| person. Comedian Bill Burr offers the best excoriation of that
| phenemonon. [0]
|
| "New phone can't fit the old charger? This is your hero?!"
|
| [0] _ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3s-qZsjK8I
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Still have fond memories of my Palm V. Was outstanding at the
| time.
| localghost3000 wrote:
| I think the best description I have ever heard of Jobs was given
| by Bill Burr: "Jesus, Ghandi, John Lennon, ME!". Much like
| Lennon, he cultivated a whole peace/love/enlightenment image
| while being a garbage person. Lennon for example, beat the shit
| out of his first wife, abandoned his first son Julian, and then
| made sure they got no money from him. Sound familiar? Yeah Jobs
| did very much the same to his first wife and daughter (well, I am
| not sure if he physically abused his wife but still..).
|
| I think you can make the argument that what Jobs brought to the
| table was impeccable taste. He was very good at pushing (some
| would say abusing) his people to make things that people
| genuinely loved. I think that design sense is notably absent in
| today's crop of tech CEO's. Again Burr nails it: "I want my
| entire album collection in this phone. GET ON IT!!"
| knuckleheadsmif wrote:
| This crap happens all the time between companies.
|
| When I worked at Apple around 1990, Steve who was as we all know
| was CEO of NeXT at the time was recruiting 6 Apple folks
| (including me) to help add the internationalization
| infrastructure to NeXT OS. We were invited to dinner at his
| Woodside home (the one where the Ducati motorcycle was parked
| inside at the bottom of the stairs which I can confirm to be
| true.)
|
| The first thing, after we sat down for dinner, is Steve read us a
| letter that the Apple Lawyers sent him threatening to sue for
| poaching employees. He then sat down and we had a wonderful
| vegetarian meal prepared by his two ex. ahead Panisse chefs.
|
| What was memorable about the meal was that Steve was still very
| emotionally attached to Apple and most of dinner was him asking
| us about Apple.
|
| None of us took him up on the Job offer and I letter learn that
| the Apple lawyers found out about the meeting before hand because
| one of us (who I'll kept nameless) alerted them about the
| meeting.
| knuckleheadsmif wrote:
| A decade or so later I worked at Intuit where Intuit, Adobe,
| Apple, Google, Pixar (and one or two other companies that
| escape me) had an anti-poaching agreement not to approach
| anyone for a job (if they however we approached by someone they
| would consider them.) All the companies were later fined (I
| think it was a court case) and employees between certain years
| at those companies who were looking for jobs got a significant
| settlement.
|
| I missed the date of qualifying for the settlement by one year
| but I know for a fact that this was indeed true because as a
| hiring manager at Intuit HR more than one time told me I could
| not cold call people at these companies to recruit.
| knuckleheadsmif wrote:
| As another aside to this story, when I was at Intuit Bill
| Campbell who was on the Apple Board and CEO/Board Member of
| Intuit in 1999 or 2000 arranged for my project (An entirely
| internet version of Quickbooks as a subscription service) to
| support the then crappy Macintosh Microsoft IE browser that
| was the main Mac browser.
|
| You have to remember that Microsoft IE on the Mac was a
| completely different code base than on windows, did not have
| any debugging, and not feature compatible especially as far
| as CSS and DOM functionality is concerned. So we did meet
| with Apple but told them that we could not support what they
| wanted unless we could get a debugger for that Mac IE at a
| minimum. The response from them was just to debug on IE in
| windows. We laughed and left the meeting.
|
| I think Apple got that response from a lot of early web app
| developers and was a factor into them taken control of their
| browser destiny and eventually releasing Safari.
|
| By the way, although I left Intuit in 2007, our product is
| the version of Quickbooks that they mainly sell, and is
| supported by all the modern browsers but in 1999 when the
| project was started developing a complex easy to use web app
| was a challenge.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| It was an insignificant settlement. This agreement was in
| place at the start of the mobile wars. Apple spent a lot of
| money suing its competitors instead of spending that money
| paying engineers to leave its competitors. Immediately
| following the ruling against the companies, salaries shot up
| industry-wide, by far more per year than each engineer got
| from the settlement for multiple years of illegal activity.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Steve Jobs immediately got rid of "About boxes" and Easter eggs
| when he returned to Apple. Probably the right call if you want to
| promote a brand of professionalism for your company.
|
| But it is a bit more than that. About boxes that indicated the
| engineers that worked on the software are kind of cute in a way
| -- recalling a time when a couple of programmers could write The
| Finder.
|
| Credits (and Easter eggs) also speak of a time when engineers, if
| not driving the boat, were at least given a good deal of leeway
| to sign their creations.
|
| I feel like there were a cadre of engineers that Jobs tried
| desperately to keep out of the public eye around the time of
| iTunes, etc. Worried, I suppose, about poaching.
|
| Presenting at WWDC turned out to be the best way an Apple
| engineer could pass out their resume.
|
| When the engineers were essentially muted I think it represented
| a power shift at Apple toward management, marketing, design.
|
| Good for Apple. It served the company and the brand well. No one
| can argue with the stock trajectory.
|
| I, on the other hand, miss the cowboy programming days.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| It was an industrywide collusion to suppress wages.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Was it? Engineers at FANG make absurd amounts of money even
| out of college. So, at the very least the collusion wasn't
| very successful
| musicale wrote:
| How overpaid are employees relative to the amount of money
| they are bringing into the company?
| musicale wrote:
| Palm really should have been on board then.
| throw4321 wrote:
| Not sure if SJ was to blame, but your sentiment about the
| commoditization of software engineering is right on target. It
| was industry-wide.
|
| It's true that teams had to grow in size as software got more
| complex. Was commoditization the best way to do it? It
| certainly aggregated power in the hands of management. That was
| probably an intended consequence.
|
| One unintended consequence is that tech leads and staff
| engineers became increasingly selected more for political than
| technical merit. That in turn decreased the per-capita merit of
| the workforce as a whole.
|
| Post-ZIRP and post-AI, a lot of layoffs are still ahead IMO.
| linguae wrote:
| I've never thought of it that way. Come to think of it, I could
| name many of the influential people at Apple from the 1970s
| through the 1990s beyond the founders and CEOs. Bill Atkinson,
| Larry Tesler, Ike Nassi, Alan Kay, Susan Kare, Chris Espinosa,
| Johanna Hoffman, Jean Louis Gassee, Steve Sakoman, Bruce
| Tognazzini, and Don Norman immediately come to mind. I can also
| name many of the key NeXT players, like Avie Tevanian and
| Bertrand Sertlet. However, with the exceptions of Jony Ive and
| Scott Forstall, I don't know the names of key engineers and
| product designers at Apple these days. This may be due to
| Apple's evolving culture of secrecy.
| cainxinth wrote:
| The company led by the petulant bully is worth trillions and the
| one led by the accurate, ethical, and reasonable person is
| defunct.
| silisili wrote:
| I thought the same, kinda sad isn't it? Palm's email to Apple
| was like a teacher talking to an unruly teen, but not
| insultingly so.
|
| So what do we learn? Either Karma isn't real, or being a
| childish bully is the key to success. I'm not sure I like
| either answer.
| voytec wrote:
| > Either Karma isn't real
|
| If you look not at the companies, but individuals...
| gist wrote:
| This is business it's not a friendly game of (whatever).
| mistrial9 wrote:
| direct slavery is very profitable
| hamandcheese wrote:
| It was not just business. It was illegal collusion.
| id00 wrote:
| It looks like it's impossible to build a highly successfull
| public company as shareholders (likely because of eroded
| responsibility) will always prioritise profit over ethics
| throw4321 wrote:
| Are these available on any site other than legacy Xitter?
| slater wrote:
| Only if you can stomach "we're not a nazi bar, ok??" substack:
|
| https://www.techemails.com/
| mepian wrote:
| "Palm now owns the former Siemens mobile patent portfolio"
|
| Man, I miss Siemens phones, they were great at the time. I wonder
| what they would be like today if Siemens didn't quit the market.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Can we please avoid posting x links? They are not accessible
| sneak wrote:
| Context: Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt at Google, and
| several other high ranking tech execs conspired to illegally fix
| wages lower by agreeing to not hire each others' staff.
|
| Billions of dollars were thus stolen from staff by these
| companies.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
|
| > _In June 2014, Judge Lucy Koh expressed concern that the
| settlement would not be a good one for the plaintiffs. Michael
| Devine, one of the plaintiffs, said the settlement was unjust. In
| a letter he wrote to the judge he said the settlement represented
| only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000
| workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded._
|
| The companies got off with barely a slap on the wrist.
| msteffen wrote:
| Lot of comments observing that Apple is doing much better than
| Palm these days, but IMO they miss the point.
|
| Steve is dead, and I don't think he got to take any of that
| victory money with him.
|
| Palm is dead too, but its investors and employees are doing
| something else now, and I don't think they're generally much
| worse for the wear. And the time that Palm's engineers spent
| there are indelibly better because their boss respected them. On
| the other hand, I don't know how many Apple employees got to
| retire early because of Steve's management, but I'm not sure
| their lives, including their time working for Steve, are better
| overall.
|
| Life is a journey, not a destination.
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