I Don't Think It's Motorola's Trade Secrets That Have Made The iPhone A Success
from the let's-be-honest-here dept
Late Friday, the news broke that Motorola was suing a former sales executive who had left Motorola and joined Apple in April. Motorola is claiming that he was sharing Motorola's trade secrets with Apple. Of course, given the directions both companies seem to be heading in with their mobile phone devices, one might think that the only "secrets" he might have shared from Motorola were about what not to do. In fact, it seems like a lot of Apple's success with the iPhone has been in ignoring many of the old rules.
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Filed Under: executies, iphone, trade secrets
Companies: apple, motorola
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Well it's obvious what happened. Apple hired the guy, listened to his secrets, and then did the exact opposite.
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Trade Secrets
From my perspective it seems more likely that Motorrola's "trade secrets" involve the technology aspect of a lot of things.
Possibly that is another reason for Apple to be strict about 3rd party Apps on the phone. It could be found several of those apps or their components would work on Motorolla hardware without modification.
But who cares at this point what any corporation/government/person with money and lackeys does. So many people are just flat out apathetic its, well, pathetic.
Hundreds of years of running from the Dark Ages, and they've willingly become the ignorant peasants.
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Noncom
Sharing trade secrets? Probably not. But if you sign a legally binding contract and then do the opposite, yes, you will get sued and you will lose.
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Re: Noncom
> do the opposite, yes, you will get sued and
> you will lose.
Depends upon your jurisdiction. Non-competes are not
supportable in California. Sure, they are in
every contract you'll sign, but they are unenforceable
and every party who's been around the block more than
once knows that.
It's a shame that non-competes are enforceable anywhere.
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on a side note if what Motorola is saying is true then shouldn't they be suing said employee? and as far as i know they can only do that if they made him sign a confidentiality agreement.
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Re: Noncom
Not necessarily, in many cases the decision comes down, that you are entitled to make a living. The noncomp agreement is vied like a EULA; it is signed under duress as the only way to get the job in the first place. Depends where it is filed & signed, of course, attitudes and laws vary greatly from state to state.
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Re: non-Competes
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trade secrets not what you think
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Motorola May Be Right
He is also accused of poaching two other Motorola staff over to Apple.
Motorola is suing him for agreeing to a golden parachute, then reneging on his obligations weeks later. If those are the facts in this case, I'm with Motorola on this one, whether they can win in California court or not.
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Not very logical since if the employee stole the secrets then Apple would have them and not Motorola, and if you had read the original article you would have seen that "...vice president for the company's mobile- device business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.." and is now "...Apple's vice president for global iPhone sales..." clearly some serious and not very replacable expertise moved from Moto to Apple, and clealry Apple needed telecom expertise to break into telecom (if you think that was easy you havn't understood the problem).
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Re:
How the @#$% would any of you dumba$$es know if a trade secret were stolen or not? "Trade secrets that a sales exec would know about are not likely to be techincal in nature"???? How the HELL would you know that? Because he's in a Sales Dept? Go back to your gaming console and power drinks kiddies.
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Re: Noncom
Besides, as many here suggest, if these secrets were worth anything Motorola wouldn't be in the shape they are in. I think It's simply that the engineer doesn't want to waste his talent in a company which is on the verge of letting their phone division go anyway.
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Punk kids
Just like the ones doing so now were "punk kids" back in the sixties. Some of them did drugs then, and now some of those have legalized pot for some medical uses.
Now we've already got talk of giving some archiving organizations copyright exemption. How long before the "punk kids" are stripping it drastically or abolishing it, noncompetes are unenforceable in many more states than they already are, and other drastic changes have produced freer and more fluid markets?
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Re: Punk kids
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