Google might not have as much to worry about as I thought they would. Papermaster’s role at Apple won’t be directly in chip making. IBM, Papermaster’s previous employer, is throwing down a lawsuit against Papermaster to prevent him from going forward with the Apple employment. (Lawsuit PDF)
Despite the non-compete agreement signed when Papermaster joined IBM, despite IBM offering a boatload of money additional to his salary to stay at IBM, and despite IBM offering to pay his salary even while he wasn’t working at IBM, he still wants to go to Apple.
From what Papermaster and Apple have been disclosing to the public, his role with Apple would be directly with the iPhone and possibly not even chip making at all.
This is going to be a long and dawn out lawsuit as IBM will not take this lightly nor just push it under the door and sweep it away.
Let the game of the lawsuits begin..once again.
November 10th, 2008 at 1:16 am
Mark Papermaster will most definitely give Apple a competitive edge. Does anybody know if he will just be working on the chips for the Iphone or will they put him to work on Apples Imac and Macbooks as well?
It is always amazing that one person can have such an impact on the computing industry. Mark Papermaster going head to head with IBM this should be very interesting.
I have a hard time believing that Papermaster will be out of the chip game for long.
November 10th, 2008 at 1:19 am
I completely agree that I also have a hard time believing that he’ll be out of the chip game for too long. It’s equally amazing that a single individual can have such an impact on an industry, but some how he’s done it and he’s done a great job of it.
November 10th, 2008 at 1:30 am
[...] read an interesting article by Jonathan Dingman over at Google Inside what truly amazes me is that one man, Mark Papermaster, can have such an impact on the chip [...]