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I wish my employer would post a $3 million bond for me.

He probably worked on Wall Street at some point as well.

My nuts are itchy!

Nov 14, 08 - 05:12 pm Comment from: KingMel

Scratch 'em. Works for me.

I don't understand why someone makes a comment about how $3M is a lot of money every time this story comes up. It would be a lot of money to you or me but to IBM this is nothing. They make this much money every 15 minutes (105B/year = 200k/min). The legal fees for this case are likely to be higher than that because so much is at stake. Clearly Apple thinks Papermaster is going to make the company a lot of money, but more importantly this is going to be very important case law for noncompete contracts, which are common in the tech industry and are being challenged in court. If noncompete contracts are not going to honored in the US it will change the way business is done in the tech sector.

Nov 15, 08 - 04:51 pm Comment from: MacMarc

This lawsuit appears to have been filed in New York. That favors IBM whereas California would have been better for Papermaster.

As a matter of procedure Papermaster needs to file his claim to be heard at the same time, or lose the right to do so.

His attack on the contract is a fairly standard attack on a noncompete. But good luck convincing a judge or jury that what you learned has a usefulness of less than a year when the product design cycle for a PowerPC processor is longer than that. Intuitively a year sounds about right.

And IBM has already made in a perfectly reasonable offer to have him sit on the beach and get paid for that year (or go away and work for any non competing company).

IBM seems to be being very reasonable and generous. The guy after all did agree not to compete with them. Now he wants out of that bargain.

Just where does IBM compete w/ Apple?

@ M, Processor chips