Comments on: Apple's Papermaster was misquoted

By: mark, boston, MA

mark, boston, MA — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:08:20 +0000

Typical Information Week trash; I have no doubt the reporter plucked that quote out intentionally. When will other reporters really hold them accountable?

By: Tuck Bodi, Denver, CO

Tuck Bodi, Denver, CO — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:32:35 +0000

What I find insulting is when a company, after about to lose an employee, tries to "buy" them back in with either a bonus or a raise. This to me is disgusting because if a company really values an employee they would have taken care of them in the first place. That's how I treated my employee's and I never had a problem. Hopefully Apple does this with Ive & et al….

By: Bill, Armonk, NY

Bill, Armonk, NY — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:14:04 +0000

You guys are missing the point. IBM is sending a message to those with less than 30 years which IBM has no hooks(ie defined pension plan). These people are leaving in droves for better opportunities..

Papermaster had 25 years with IBM. He is on the cash blance plan with IBM and recieved stock options. It is the stock grants agreement which has the non-compete. Not the business condusct guidlines.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:13:30 +0000

Funny how the media works. This article cites an inaccuracy in that Mark Papermaster was quoted out of context, but states further down in the article:

"…rather than escorting him out of the building immediately — standard practice in Silicon Valley — they let him work in his office for nearly two weeks after giving notice."

And yet, Mark Papermaster worked in Austin.

ex ped: so?

By: zahadum, katmandu, nepal

zahadum, katmandu, nepal — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 02:51:52 +0000

ATTN: WEB EDITOR @ FORTUNE:

when will the webmaster at fortune be spanked for his bone-headed omission of a PRINT command for this site?

when this page is saved, as-is, then the reader's local version of the document is bogged down with all the ancillary mark-up … in this case, it is not just junky adverts, but rather dozens (hundreds?) of keywords in "TAGS" navbar.

while non-editorial content may be useful on-line, the deluge of a 'Tag Cloud' pollutes the reader's off-line (local) search-space with so many extraneous references that Spotlight chokes instead of producing results that are Useful AND Quick! (of course the anemic LSA engine which drives Spotlight has not been substantially improved by apple in the decade since it was first inaugurated as V-TWIN, so it is hard for Spotlight to discriminate amongst the different parts of a an over-burdened document in order to give more/less weight to a search-term depending on its editorial role in the document).

anyways, please start using CSS3/xhtml so that it is easy for the reader to obtain a view which scales (both physically for different display geometries as well as different storage models): i want to be able to save an article so that i can preserve just the body – at least until such time as apple starts to get serious about improving knowledge representation (hello DAML!) in its serach engine (heck, i would even settle for some bayesian filters -osx's MAIL.APP uses them! – to make better guesses about my intentions by being more selective in which parts of the over-burdened web page are relevant to my query).

my weary desktop search engine thanks you.

ex ped: Thanks for the suggestion. Onpassing to the tech staff.

By: John, Boston, ma

John, Boston, ma — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 02:01:46 +0000

keith, maybe you don't understand the definition of divested. IBM sold off that business. Those products, those employees, that business is now in the hands of lenovo. It does not exist in the present day IBM. The same IBM that has brought this lawsuit.

This is a very valid argument for claiming that these two companies are not in competition with each other.

By: Shava Nerad, Somerville, MA

Shava Nerad, Somerville, MA — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 01:51:17 +0000

If you look at a list of this "reporter's" column in InfoWeek, you'll see that a good many of them read like tech industry gossip columns. No surprises.

By: Ira in LA (CA)

Ira in LA (CA) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:43:05 +0000

The court did not grant an injunction. It issued a temporary restraining order, which is designed simply to permit enough time to arrive at the correct decision and to prevent the status quo from getting too far down the line. It was decidely not an injunction.

By: TAH, Denver, Colo

TAH, Denver, Colo — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:51:32 +0000

California law does not govern, because the agreement was not between Papermaster and Apple. The noncompete was between Papermaster and IBM, which I'm guessing is based in New York, since the court hearing the case is the US District Court in New York.

By: Mark , White Plains NY

Mark , White Plains NY — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:32:43 +0000

IBM seems to apply this selectively. CA competes with IBM, run by a former IBM exec. Symantec competes and is run by a former IBM exec. Silverlake Partners probably owns several business that compete on one level or another with IBM and several IBM execs are their now.