Apple’s Papermaster was misquoted

Typical Information Week trash; I have no doubt the reporter plucked that quote out intentionally. When will other reporters really hold them accountable?

What I find insulting is when a company, after about to lose an employee, tries to “buy” them back in with either a bonus or a raise. This to me is disgusting because if a company really values an employee they would have taken care of them in the first place. That’s how I treated my employee’s and I never had a problem. Hopefully Apple does this with Ive & et al….

You guys are missing the point. IBM is sending a message to those with less than 30 years which IBM has no hooks(ie defined pension plan). These people are leaving in droves for better opportunities..

Papermaster had 25 years with IBM. He is on the cash blance plan with IBM and recieved stock options. It is the stock grants agreement which has the non-compete. Not the business condusct guidlines.

Funny how the media works. This article cites an inaccuracy in that Mark Papermaster was quoted out of context, but states further down in the article:

“…rather than escorting him out of the building immediately — standard practice in Silicon Valley — they let him work in his office for nearly two weeks after giving notice.”

And yet, Mark Papermaster worked in Austin.

ex ped: so?

ATTN: WEB EDITOR @ FORTUNE:

when will the webmaster at fortune be spanked for his bone-headed omission of a PRINT command for this site?

when this page is saved, as-is, then the reader’s local version of the document is bogged down with all the ancillary mark-up … in this case, it is not just junky adverts, but rather dozens (hundreds?) of keywords in “TAGS” navbar.

while non-editorial content may be useful on-line, the deluge of a ‘Tag Cloud’ pollutes the reader’s off-line (local) search-space with so many extraneous references that Spotlight chokes instead of producing results that are Useful AND Quick! (of course the anemic LSA engine which drives Spotlight has not been substantially improved by apple in the decade since it was first inaugurated as V-TWIN, so it is hard for Spotlight to discriminate amongst the different parts of a an over-burdened document in order to give more/less weight to a search-term depending on its editorial role in the document).

anyways, please start using CSS3/xhtml so that it is easy for the reader to obtain a view which scales (both physically for different display geometries as well as different storage models): i want to be able to save an article so that i can preserve just the body - at least until such time as apple starts to get serious about improving knowledge representation (hello DAML!) in its serach engine (heck, i would even settle for some bayesian filters -osx’s MAIL.APP uses them! - to make better guesses about my intentions by being more selective in which parts of the over-burdened web page are relevant to my query).

my weary desktop search engine thanks you.

ex ped: Thanks for the suggestion. Onpassing to the tech staff.

keith, maybe you don’t understand the definition of divested. IBM sold off that business. Those products, those employees, that business is now in the hands of lenovo. It does not exist in the present day IBM. The same IBM that has brought this lawsuit.

This is a very valid argument for claiming that these two companies are not in competition with each other.

If you look at a list of this “reporter’s” column in InfoWeek, you’ll see that a good many of them read like tech industry gossip columns.

No surprises.

The court did not grant an injunction. It issued a temporary restraining order, which is designed simply to permit enough time to arrive at the correct decision and to prevent the status quo from getting too far down the line. It was decidely not an injunction.

California law does not govern, because the agreement was not between Papermaster and Apple. The noncompete was between Papermaster and IBM, which I’m guessing is based in New York, since the court hearing the case is the US District Court in New York.

IBM seems to apply this selectively. CA competes with IBM, run by a former IBM exec. Symantec competes and is run by a former IBM exec. Silverlake Partners probably owns several business that compete on one level or another with IBM and several IBM execs are their now.

Yes i agree that the aside is one giant asides, and i agree it would negate his comment if IBM was still in the PC business. Remember the suit is to enforce a non-compete clause and IBM does not currently compete in the PC business. So the fact that IBM used to compete is not relevant.

Another example of B.S. reporting, and the news media wonders why nobody trusts them. Where is the integrity in reporting?

Since Apple, and this man’s employment, are located in California, doesn’t the California Supreme Court decision in Edwards vs. Arthur Andersen, S147190, regarding the non-enforcability of non-compete clauses apply?

Non-competes are usually invalid in California. The law is all on Papermaster’s side, as far as I know. I don’t think IBM could win this case, anyway, especially since Apple is in California.

Enough is enough. Competition is an economic term. 2 firms compete when on the same market customers can chose between products of those two firms to fulfill the same need (called “substitutes”). Let’s get all the judges out of our back. The incompetence of the Courts is what is obvious in this case. IBM IS NOT a competitor of Apple today. Wake up, IBM: you’re gone. You don’t belong on this market anymore. What the future holds, the future holds. You cannot trial a guy on supposed intents. Everybody who agrees should boycott IBM products on other markets. It’s our freedom of work that is at stake.

Thanks S. Robins for giving us the name of the reporter Paul McDougall.
One of the great things about technology is that we can more easily track and validate the information we receive. I will definitely think about that when I see the name Paul McDougall next to an article. “Paul McDougall” ≠ “The whole truth and nothing but the truth”

“…aside from the divested IBM personal computer business…”
I’m sorry, but that is one gargantuan “aside” and totally negates Papermasters’ claim of never hearing about competition between Apple and IBM.
What a crock!!

So instead of actually opening the PDF yourself and seeing if the quote was accurate and in context you just piled on? Is it really too much to expect a professional journalist to think ‘gee, that’s surprising… let me look at the document it comes from’?

The arrogance and ignorance in the computer reporting world is astounding. Paul McDougall, along with many other computer industry reporters are not reporters. They are opportunists who do not know even the fundamentals of journalism. The fundamentals of journalism are no longer necessary because all ‘reporting’ is simply a desperate attempt to generate content to post around their ad space. There is very little interest in in-depth reporting because fluff and ads on a page sell just as well as in-depth and ads on a page.

It’s a town full of losers…

Agreed. It’s time reporters take some responsibility for their “Truthiness”

Its definitely very odd for IBM to try to enforce this non-compete in the way they have with Apple. If IBM can exclude him from working in IT, his chosen profession, how is he going to feed his family?

Why do you let a guy that screwed up, maybe on purpose, hide?

The name of the InfoWeek reporter is Paul McDougall. Paul McDougall lifted a half quote out of the context of a court filing and published it to the eventual embarrassment of many others.