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Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

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Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#91

Post by shadowgovt »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #73
shadowgovt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#92

Post by ec109685 »

pm90 wrote: post #57

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?

They had a mutual non compete going. Here’s another instance where a cold recruiting email was “against policy”: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543?s=...

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#93

Post by astrange »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #69
pm90 wrote: post #57

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?

[flagged]

Anyone working there at the time made approximately a zillion dollars from stock compensation, so it doesn’t seem like it worked.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#94

Post by refulgentis »

alasdair_ wrote: post #88
eyelidlessness wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> He was an average person. Average people tend to at least care about their own children. Jobs treated his own appallingly badly.

You'd be surprised

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#95

Post by milemi »

shadowgovt wrote: post #87
milemi wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What war other than the bidding war for talent was Jobs threatening?

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 wi…

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.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#96

Post by neffo »

DonHopkins wrote: post #15
friedman23 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit >WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS…

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.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#97

Post by akira2501 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #72
wahnfrieden wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this email's aim is to suppress market wages. you're mythologizing and neglecting the market-wide knock-on effects of rampant illegal wage theft collusion like this.

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…

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.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#99

Post by shadowgovt »

milemi wrote: post #95
shadowgovt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

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.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#100

Post by shadowgovt »

akira2501 wrote: post #97
shadowgovt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.
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