on 5 December 2008So Apple’s new head of engineering for the iPhone and iPod – or iBoss, as he’ll presumably be known – has been sent on gardening leave after his previous employer, IBM, invoked a ‘no compete’ clause in his contract.
Mark Papermaster had done 26 years for Big Blue, which you’d think would entitle him to a gold watch rather than a snippy lawsuit, but the small print apparently specified that he had to wait a year before going to work for a competitor, in case he took any trade secrets with him. I wonder who else, other than a competitor, would have been likely to employ him? As a semiconductor hardware specialist, he wasn’t going to manage a Ben & Jerry’s.
Odd that this restraint of trade can pass legal muster in the land of the free market, but the gavel has fallen, and Papermaster is now the corporate equivalent of that bloke played by Tom Hanks who was stranded in an airport by a diplomatic technicality. In the film, he wore an ill-fitting grey suit and responded to any questions with a slightly confused half-smile. Insert your own IBM engineer joke here.
Are Apple and IBM competitors, then? IBM is hardly noted for its portable media players or mobile phones. Of course, those aren’t the only things Apple makes, either, but a brief study of the history of communications between Apple departments should have allayed any fears that Papermaster’s specialist knowledge might find its way into the Mac division. Anyway, IBM doesn’t make computers any more, unless you count stuff like blade servers. Even at geek parties, the blade server guys can be found alone in corners pretending to be accountants.
To be honest, I’m not sure what IBM does make these days. I have a vague sense that it ‘does stuff for corporates’. When I’m not writing things like this, I sometimes ‘do stuff for corporates’, and it’s a bizarre experience. No fewer than eleven people have to be involved in any commissioning process, however simple the task. This is because none of them know quite what they want done or why, and they’re hoping that if they talk about it for long enough it’ll become clear. In fact, it only becomes clear after you’ve completed the work, when they decide either that it’s exactly what they wanted and were very clever to have commissioned so well, or that they actually wanted something completely different. Then you either start again or do eleven conflicting sets of corrections.
At least nobody tries to tell me who I can and can’t work for. There’s a bit of jostling between rival magazines, but they don’t end up in court fighting over freelancers. Then again, it’s best not to take the mickey. When Ashley Highfield was head of digital at the BBC, he did a lot of clever things – so many that he had no time left to answer any of my emails about them – but he’s probably best remembered for launching an online platform that only worked with Microsoft Windows. It was recently announced that Ashley is going to work for Ben & Jerry’s. No, actually Microsoft. Hmm.
Should Tony Blair have been prohibited from working for competing countries? Less than a year after resigning from UK plc, he’d taken advisory jobs with JP Morgan, a US investment bank (probably looked a safe bet at the time), and Zurich, a financial services group whose name kind of gives away its national allegiance. Cynics might point out that he’s also done voluntary work for Rupert Murdoch, an Australian, since 1995, and since 2001 for George Walker Bush, a trading name of the American East India Company.
W, whose job finishes in January, is unlikely to stray far afield for paid employment, since there are only two other nations that would give him a job and he can’t remember where they are. Perhaps he could stay on and do the hedges at the White House, where Obama can get him confused with other Caucasian staff and absent-mindedly address him as ‘boy’.
The problem for Mark Papermaster is that by the time he gets to start work, there may be no job for him. According to Apple co-founder and tech industry comment circuit dilettante Steve Wozniak, the iPod has all but had its day, and is headed for the dustbin of obsolete technology along with the transistor radio and the tracked variable rate mortgage.
Woz has occasionally been wrong, like when he told Steve Jobs he could fiddle about all he wanted with that ‘mouse’ thing, the future was in moving DACs into software and reducing the I/O chip count. (I’m paraphrasing here.) But it’s a sobering thought that if the novelty did wear off those fashionably metrosexy tech accessories, it could bring on a credit crunch in Cupertino. Let’s hope Mr Papermaster has a few good ideas up his sleeve.
On second thoughts, that probably wasn’t the best choice of words.
Adam Banks will write for food, or, if that’s too expensive, sterling.
adambanksdotcom Google Instant seems like the search equivalent of the Interrupting Cow knock-knock joke