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Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

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Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#241

Post by jart »

snapetom wrote: post #196
jart wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if Masimo had made Lamego a significant shareholder, he wouldn't have left his "CTO" role to become a mere Apple employee. Masimo is an $8b company. They created a spinoff called Cercacor which Lamego got to be CTO of. My best guess is it wasn't a real startup like we're used to in the Silicon Valley sense. There wasn't any real opportunity for him to gain generational wealth there if he was successful. Apple n…

> Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals. It’s mindblowing how big of a gap this is for these non-tech companies. I work for a company that sold to PE. The owners walked away with the vast majority of a 1.5 billion deal. I asked if employees were given anything. “Sure. Some got as much as 50k!” I was told. Using some standard equity math for early engine…

Yeah tech startups are great like that. Big tech companies are even better. With them, you don't have to wait for a successful exit, or even work there that long, to get your low seven figures. No one in America is working harder to restore the middle class than the tech industry. Even the person who cleans my house makes more than 50k. Meanwhile legacy enterprises and private equity are doing everything in their power to destroy it. This is a moral righteous struggle for the heart of America, which makes it such a shame that Lamego was found by the courts to have acted dishonorably, but we mustn't forget who's side we're on.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#242

Post by itake »

spogbiper wrote: post #16
thebruce87m wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds good for the employees, so go Apple?

Yes, very good for the employees. Apple even offered them 2x their salaries to leave Masimo.

why is 2x the right number for their current employees? how are the employees that left the company, but contributed to the patent/company being compensated with this deal?

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#243

Post by bookofjoe »

bookofjoe wrote: post #199
parsimo2010 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Masimo only refined pulse oximetry in the 90s, as pulse oximetry was invented in the 1970s (prior oximeters did not resemble the devices seen today). Everything after that has been tweaks/improvements to the base method, but I wouldn't call them the inventors of the technology. The only IP that companies can own now are specific methods/improvements, not the base idea of measuring SpO2 with light. All Apple has to do…

Yes. I recall the brand new pulse oximeters (I don't recall the manufacturer) that appeared in the ORs at UCLA Medical Center right around when I started my anesthesiology residency in 1977. They were SUPER expensive when they first came out, so much so that our department bought 3 of them, which were used only for the most critical cases. I remember the chief resident sometimes had to decide who got one when 2 resid…

They cost $10,000-$15,000.

In today's dollars, that's $54,000-$80,000.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#244

Post by DesiLurker »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #17
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be a bit more sympathetic if this was not about a trillion dollar company who poached some employees rather than engage in a licensing deal.

It's really easy to avoid your employees being "poached": treat them well, and pay them better.

yes, and ribcage should be mesh-gridded if it did not want to be knifed, Right?

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#245

Post by DesiLurker »

geodel wrote: post #111
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really easy to avoid your employees being "poached": treat them well, and pay them better.

Absolutely. Similarly, I tell parents who keep whining about soaring education costs and employability: Educate them well, and get them high paying jobs.

right, just learn to outrun the chubby guys when the bear chases.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#246

Post by wyldfire »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #11
BallsInIt wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software patents are a scourge.

I would be a bit more sympathetic if this was not about a trillion dollar company who poached some employees rather than engage in a licensing deal.

They were "poached" or the employees negotiated their value?

"anti-poaching" is how big tech companies described their anti-competitive agreements [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#247

Post by adrr »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #232
adrr wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did they steal? CEO destroyed his own company when he bought a bunch of highend speaker brands. WTF is a medical device company doing buying consumer audio companies?

That’s not for you to decide. It somebody is eating/smoking/drinking themselves to death, does that give you the right to murder them?

I don't follow your argument. Are you saying eating or smoking to death is like a CEO making bad decisions that causes their company to struggle?

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#248

Post by to11mtm »

geodel wrote: post #100
scarface_74 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to what HNers are so happy to say about restaurant owners who actually have to be profitable and can’t depend on the largess of investors, if Masimo can’t afford to pay market rates to developers, the company doesn’t deserve to exist.

Right. Somehow people here are struggling on how to pin blame on Apple even when developers are better off with Apple's offer. It is a great outcome for anyone who is developer. If in their world view "best developer salary is not always the best thing" one could have better reasoning for supporting little guy Massimo getting crushed by Apple.

On what level however?

One of the biggest pain points I have had with the 'smartphone revolution' post Android/iOS is that almost every wearable/pocketable is a watch. nobody's trying new formats that could be useful!

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#249

Post by thfuran »

crazygringo wrote: post #173
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #108

I never really understood why protecting Massimo in this situation was more important than allowing customers to access a feature in their watch. I get patent law is important, but they seemed more interested in rent-seeking from Apple than actually providing a desirable product that people could benefit from.

Patents are literally for rent-seeking. They are explicitly not to maximize the number of people who can benefit from a product in the short term, but precisely to limit it so the inventor can make more money. The idea being that in the long run the inventions it incentivizes outweigh the people who are limited from benefiting in the short term. Judges aren't in the position to weigh societal benefits in each individ…

They are explicitly to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. In practice, I think the terms are now much too long and the lack of requirement to actually use or cheaply license a patent makes the system better at generating profits than fostering innovation.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#250

Post by scarface_74 »

Teever wrote: post #237
scarface_74 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why focus just on Apple instead of the other companies - Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay? But since when have people making BigTech money been afraid to venture out on their own to found a startup and would 30% more (completely made up number) and that was probably tied up in RSUs and not cash really made a difference? Shouldn’t the idea that these people were making less than market wages spu…

Because this is a thread about apple and the other companies are implied with the word 'collusion.' As to your other points these things are not a binary, they are a gradient with Apple and the companies they colluding with having an incremental effect on the market that accrues over time as they consolidate wealth and restrict competition and the innovation that comes from it. It is difficult for people to find jobs…

It was detrimental to the employees. And that’s why I’m arguing against the narrative of other commenters that Apple was wrong for offering Masimo employees money to leave.

It’s the same as the Windsurf situation with Google. In other words, I don’t care that Masimo was hurt because employees took a better deal from Apple.

As far as did it hurt the industry, there is really no logical argument that these companies who were already extremely profitable roundly have had the money to invest in their products if they hadn’t suppressed wages, that some new challenger was going to come along and compete with any of them if Microsoft (search and mobile phones) and Facebook (mobile phones couldn’t).

These employees weren’t going to take the extra money they made an invest in some world changing startup (that’s what VCs are for) that would pay more than BigTech. 50-70K wouldn’t be the determining factor to invest in their own startup.

The startup offers I was getting to be a “CTO” [1] (yes it would have been a laughably inflated title) was less than I was making as a mid level employee at AWS at the time (2020-2023) for more work and more risks.

[1] I didn’t go in AWS as a software developer, I went in working in Professional Services. But my previous experience was strategy and architecture at a couple of startups.

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