‘Bloomberg’: Jobs wanted Palm to agree not to hire each other’s employees
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Aug 20, 2009 at 5:32am
Former Palm CEO Ed Colligan rejected a proposal from Apple CEO Steve Jobs to refrain from hiring each other’s employees two years ago, calling it wrong and “likely illegal,” according to a Bloomberg report.
Colligan, who stepped down as CEO in June, discussed the matter with Jobs in August 2007, as the mobile-phone war heated up, according to the communications, the article adds. Apple had introduced the iPhone two months earlier, just as Palm hired a former Apple executive, Jon Rubinstein, to develop new smart phones.
Rubenstein, who left Apple in 2006, served as the head of the Mac hardware engineering division before becoming senior vice president of the company’s iPod music player division. According to Bloomberg, Jobs told Colligan he was concerned that Rubinstein was recruiting Apple employees. “We must do whatever we can to stop this,” Jobs purportedly said in the communications.
The exact details of what Jobs proposed to Colligan aren’t known; Jobs didn’t mention a proposal in the communications reviewed by Bloomberg. Jobs said Apple had patents and more money than Palm if the companies ended up in a legal fight, according to the communications.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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