The viral letter Steve Jobs sent to competitors to steer clear of Apple employees: “One of us must change”
The Apple co-founder threatened to “go to war.” Find out over what.
Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, was far from pleased with the actions of one of Apple’s competitors.
His frustration is evident in a series of email exchanges he had with Bruce Chizen, then CEO of Adobe. Jobs also had some tense moments with Google’s top executives at the time, Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin. In the leaked emails, Jobs expressed visible anger, accusing these companies of poaching Apple employees.
“Bruce, Adobe is recruiting from Apple. They have hired one person already and are calling lots more. I have a standing policy with out recruiters that we don’t recruit from Adobe. It seems you have a different policy. One of us must change our policy. Please let me know who,” wrote Jobs in one of the emails leaked by Techemail.
Chizen replied: “I thought we agreed not to recruit any senior level employees (at Adobe, this is Sr. Director/VP and represents about 2% of the population). I am pretty sure your recruiters have approached more junior ones. I would propose we keep it this way. Open to discuss. It would be good to agree.”
Tensions were clearly rising.
Jobs responded that he would instruct his recruiters to approach any Adobe employees outside that senior group freely. But Chizen wasn’t thrilled with that stance either: “I’d rather agree NOT to actively solicit any employees from either company. If employees proactively approaches, then it’s acceptable. If you are in agreement, I will let my folks know,” replied the Apple leader.
Techemail also leaked another batch of emails, this time involving Google executives. Sergey Brin wrote that he had received a call from a “very agitated” Steve Jobs. Apparently, Jobs accused Google of hiring people from the Safari team.
“He made several veiled threats, though I’m inclined not to take them too seriously,” Brin noted in one email.
In another message, a former Google executive claimed that Jobs essentially said hiring even one Apple employee would be seen as a declaration of war. In the end, though, tensions cooled and the situation didn’t escalate further.
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