Thursday, August 20, 2009
Apple CEO to Palm: I’ll Quit Sniffing Your Org Chart if You Quit Sniffing Mine
Apple appears to have a particular affinity for the unwritten no-poaching agreements said to be so popular among the nation’s biggest tech companies. Earlier this summer, the New York Times reported that Apple may have quietly negotiated an agreement with Google not to hire away each other’s top talent. Now, Bloomberg claims that the company attempted to win a similar commitment from Palm, but was rebuffed.
The days of the traditional gaming console are coming to an end–according to entrepreneur Steve Perlman, anyway.
Morbidly inclined investors and business media can speculate all they like about Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s health and Apple’s future with or without him, but in fact, the company has never been healthier. Apple just reported a blowout quarter.
Macworld 2009 is over, but the rumors that prefaced it and were then left unaddressed, remain. Two in particular: an updated iMac and a redesigned Mac mini–both of which failed to make an appearance during Phil Schiller’s Macworld keynote, though it was widely believed they would. The refresh may happen yet, however. Apple has on many occasions uncrated new products on the heels of Macworld.
This is pretty funny. Mark Papermaster, the 26-year IBM (IBM) veteran being sued by his employer for taking a job at Apple, is convinced Big Blue’s suit is entirely without merit. Why? Apple doesn’t compete with IBM and never has.
What a lousy day to report earnings. The Dow fell 231.77 points, or 2.5 percent, to finish at 9,033.66, and Nasdaq dropped 73.35 points, or 4.1 percent, to finish at 1,696.68, in a market that beat most tech issues into bloody submission. Not the sort of jovial earnings report atmosphere you hope for when you’re a company whose share price has lost half its value since the beginning of the year. But lo and behold! When Apple reported quarterly results today, they were good … very good.
If there was any comic relief during Tuesday’s Apple event, it was provided by Microsoft, which played Curly to CEO Steve Jobs’s Moe and COO Tim Cook’s Larry. Discussing the dramatic increase in the Mac’s market share in the past year, Cook said it was driven partially by “something we didn’t do: Vista.”
At an invitation-only event at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the company’s latest revision of its line of notebooks. Before demoing the hardware though, Jobs invites COO Tim Cook on stage to offer an overview of the Mac ecosystem.
