IBM’s legal efforts to enforce a noncompete agreement that would have prevented 26-year company veteran Mark Papermaster from jumping ship for a high-profile job at Apple appear to have failed. In a terse statement issued this morning, Apple said Papermaster will join the company as SVP of Devices Hardware Engineering on April 24.
Oh, it’s on now. Mark Papermaster, the IBM veteran poached by Apple last month to become its senior vice president of Devices Hardware Engineering, has filed a countersuit against his former employer in a fast-metastasizing dispute over his noncompete contract.
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.
“I do not recall a single instance of Apple being described as a competitor of IBM during my entire tenure at IBM,” Papermaster said in a court filing. Now, I know Apple’s famous “1984″ ad is a few decades old now and and memories of the company’s 1984 Annual Shareholders meeting are well faded, even at Apple. But surely someone, somewhere in Cupertino must recall CEO Steve Jobs’s comments at that meeting.
If IBM veteran Mark Papermaster is able to begin work at Apple without being sued into oblivion by his former employer, he may end up in Tony Fadell’s old office. Fadell, senior vice president of Apple’s iPod division and one of the chief architects of its audio strategy, is leaving the company and Papermaster is his intended replacement.
Apple’s efforts to build its own chip development brain trust out of its acquisition of PA Semi have run afoul of IBM. Mark Papermaster, a 26-year IBM veteran and vice president of its Blade Development unit–a division that designs corporate data centers, plans to take a new job with Apple in early November, and Big Blue is doing its damndest to stop him. The company has filed suit against Papermaster, claiming his noncompete agreement with IBM prohibits him from taking a job with Apple.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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