Mark Papermaster, a senior vice president at IBM, has apparently taken a job with Apple computer and is expected to start working for Apple next month, according to reports. However, IBM has filed suit this week against Papermaster in a US District Court in Manhattan to stop Papermaster from joining Apple. The basis of the case is a breach in Papermaster’s Noncompetition Agreement he signed with IBM in 2006. That agreement states that Papermaster cannot join a firm that competes with IBM within one year of his termination of employment.  Mark Papermaster has been with IBM for 26 years and is a member of IBM’s elite I&VT (Integration & Values Team), which includes IBM’s top 300 senior managers and thus has wide access to company intellectual property and trade secrets, including top secret IBM strategy. 

IBM’s Case: Noncompete Agreement Details

The details of the IBM Noncompetition Agreement are significant. The agreement states that Papermaster agrees that he will not (within 1 year of termination) “engage in or associate with (a) any ‘Business Enterprise’ or (b) any significant competitor or major competitor of the Company…”.  By “Business Enterprise” the agreement means any entity or entity that owns or controls a significant interest in any entity that engages in competition with the “business units or divisions of the Company” (IBM) in which you have worked at any time during the two year period prior to the termination. The agreement further defines “engage in” completely to include both consultant and contractor status, so even if Papermaster didn’t join Apple as an employee he would still be barred from engaging with Apple. 

IBM’s case based on this Noncompetition Agreement seems to hinge on Apple being deemed:

• a “significant competitor” to IBM
• a “major competitor of the company” {that being IBM}
• or an entity that engages in competition with business units or divisions of IBM

Mark Papermaster’s Role at Apple

It is not clear what Papermaster’s role would be at Apple. But IBM is hell bent on him not joining Apple. The company offered him a substantial pay increase to keep him. Additionally, it is reported IBM offered to pay him one year’s salary if he would just refrain from joining a competitor. A MacNN post notes that he was expecting to work closely with Steve Jobs.

Ashlar-Vellum is saying that the beta version of v.8 products for Mac Intel is very stable in all functional areas except photo-realistic rendering. Ashlar-Vellum users can download the latest Intel Mac beta here.

In the final section of an IT reported aimed at understanding the AEC market, Architosh discussed an “inevitable change in microprocessor architectures” where a “new age of compute power and data access, where one’s desire to compute on data is not limited to the physical confines of office or home.”

The purpose of the “forward looking analysis” section of the AEC IT report study in 2002 was to explain the rationale for both sticking withor adopting the Macintosh platform. The report made bold claims and statements that at the time may have been regarded at their best as “misplaced” or at their worst as an “over-reaching” argument for Mac adoption. However they were based on a rationale has turned out to be solidly conclusive in the end.

The Discussion of ARM and PowerPC

The report read: “This projection foretells of a change in the way engineers architect microprocessors.”

Back in 2002 Intel was producing Pentiums with staggering long pipelines and the chip war dialog was centered on ever-increasing frequency numbers. The report continues in the next paragraph that: “More importantly power-consumption on equal footing with performance is vital to the types of new wireless devices that will bring data and entertainment to any device, anywhere, at any time. It is important to notice that this paradigm shift in processor design is resulting in different research and development (R&D) paths for new and existing players in the microprocessor space.”

The report at the time cited IBM exclusively for understanding the shift in microprocessor development, while being critical of AMD’s and Intel’s performance over energy philosophy. The report also positively cited ARM — which currently powers the Apple iPhone.

Louis Gerstner’s (former IBM CEO) Second Internet

A whole page of the report cites and embraces the former IBM CEO’s long term vision of a Second Internet Era characterized by “ubiquitous high-speed wired (and wireless) access.”

The report reads: “In this second phase, people will easily connect to information from a plethora of different devices capable of playing and producing all forms of media (text, voice, image, video, sound, motion). In such a world of many different types of devices at a huge range of price points, microprocessor architectures will require a policy of energy consumption and specialized processing over crude processing performance.”

Apple and PA Semi

It is in this context that Apple’s move to acquire PA Semi addresses the emergence of the Second Internet Era, as described by Lou Gerstner. In the second era leaner processor design is the goal and things like “total talk time” are the new bragging rights. Locking horns in a megahertz race no longer matters for competitors in microprocessor design.

Our 2002 report concluded that Apple would emerge with distinct advantages. “In our view, IBM’s forward-looking vision with processor design places them [Apple] in a strategic position in the industry going forward.” Lou Gerstner believed that the battle for the datacenter processing supremacy was more lucrative in the Second Internet Era than the aging PC model. “That is why Intel wanted Itanium in the first place”, reads the report.

What we couldn’t see at the time would be the emergence of PA Semi — a company that was not yet created — that they would emerge as a powerful force in microprocessor design utilizing the PowerPC architecture.

However with energy concerns far greater than they are today, the emphasis on low-power forms for chip design benefits both the datacenter (like never before) and the mobile Internet device market equally. Apple’s real plans for PA Semi remain unclear at the device level, but at the more macro level Apple can utilize PA Semi’s core strengths across a full spectrum — from the server in the data center (Xserve) to the next amazing mobile device from Apple…whatever that device just happens to be!

Editor’s Notes:

The 2002 AEC IT CAD Study report discussed in this article is currently out of print. It was originally available for $50.USD to non-members of AIWUG and was acquired by AEC firms, CAD software companies serving the AEC market, several universities and the US and French governments.

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