It's not entirely surprising that Jobs wanted to strip his employees of their right to seek market wages; for all his talk of disruptive nonconformity, he has a notoriously nasty and authoritarian management style. And he reportedly had a similar "no poaching" deal in place with Google. What is eye-opening about Bloomberg's report is the frank manner in which then-Palm CEO Ed Colligan pushed back:

"Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal," Colligan said to Jobs, 54, according to the communications.

Palm had just hired iPod executive Jon Rubinstein away from Apple and surely knew it would soon embark on an epic Apple hiring spree; Rubinstein's blunt response was no doubt intended to be part of a library of evidence of Apple's behavior, should one ever be needed. But Jobs was not cowed. According to Bloomberg, he stated that "Apple had patents and more money than Palm if the companies ended up in a legal fight."

Who leaked these "communications" — emails, presumably — to Bloomberg? The obvious bet is Palm, which has been engaged in a back-and-forth war with Apple to allow its Palm Pre mobile device, which competes with Apple's iPhone, to sync with Apple's iTunes software. Apple's attempts to stop such syncing have been the object of deserved ridicule online, and Jobs' threatening message to Palm might have been leaked to drum up further outrage and put more pressure on Apple to open its platform .

There's also a chance someone involved with the Justice Department's ongoing investigation into Silicon Valley hiring is the source of the leak. That probe involves not only Apple but Google and Yahoo, as well, according to a Washington Post report.

Whatever the source of the information, the bottom line for Apple is that it faces a mounting perception that it is a bully, between this, the Palm Pre issue and the two federal investigations into ties between Google and Apple, to say nothing of its exclusionary policies concerning the iPhone app store. That's not going to dent, say, iPhone sales anytime soon. But it's going to hurt Apple's ability to pose as the Valley's corporate iconoclast, which will have a real, if intangible, effect on the company long-term.

[via Business Insider]

He's just one Jobs ex among many. A quick tally:

• Palm's financial backer, Elevation Partners, employs Fred Anderson, the former Apple CFO who publicly battled with Jobs over blame for Apple's stock-options backdating scandal.
  
• The company also hired away Apple's former head of Mac PR, Lynn Fox.
  
• Then there was the poaching of Mike Bell, who had been at Apple for 16 years and was senior VP for product development.

Palm's hiring spree grew so annoying to Jobs that he supposedly called up Rubinstein and screamed at him.

Jobs had reason to be agitated. Rubinstein successfully instigated a crash development program that, somehow, conjured an incredibly slick device, the Pre, from a company whose technology had been languishing for years.

In the words of tech blogger John Gruber, "it's quite possible that they have done everything right since" the launch of the iPhone. "Palm designed, built, and released the Pre, WebOS, and an app store, all in about two years."

The Palm team's experience at Apple no doubt helped along the way; it would appear some very detailed knowledge of Apple's iTunes helped allow the Pre to magically sync with the media software, an impressive feat.

The Pre, just released, promises to give Apple's iPhone the most worrisome competition it's yet seen.

And now Rubinstein has his prize, taking control of the whole company from 16-year Palm veteran Ed Colligan. If Jobs needed a catalyst to get him fired up about his return to the helm of Apple later this month, he sure got it.

Amid SEC charges that Apple management had shifted the dates of stock options to benefit executives, including Jobs, Anderson, and former general counsel Nancy Heinen, the company took an $84 million charge in 2006. Jobs and Apple settled a shareholder lawsuit for $14 million, but avoided trouble with the SEC. Anderson and Heinen paid $3.5 million and $2.2 million in fines respectively, without admitting guilt.

The episode caused a major rift between Anderson and Jobs. Anderson had left Apple in 2004, but stayed on the board until the scandal led to his resignation in 2006. In the meantime, Anderson had joined Elevation Partners, a private-equity firm in Silicon Valley. As the stock-options scandal grew, Anderson and Jobs pointed fingers at each other, at one point issuing dueling press releases shifting the blame. Anderson has long maintained that Jobs knew more about the options chicanery than he has let on.

Elevation, which also counts famed Valley investor Roger McNamee and U2 frontman Bono as partners, backed Palm, a rival to Apple in the smartphone business, and recruited a former top Apple executive, Jon Rubinstein, as Palm's executive chairman. No one in Silicon Valley honestly believes this is a coincidence.

Forbes is another Elevation investment. The May 11 story, written by Bill Barrett and teased on the cover, centers on the 118-page transcript of a three-hour interview Jobs gave SEC examiners trying a case against former Apple general counsel Nancy Heinen, which the magazine obtained at some difficulty through a Freedom of Information Act. In the interview with SEC examiners, Jobs complained that the board was not looking out for him and he had to ask for a generous stock-options package, but maintained that he was largely unaware of the backdating and ignorant of the accounting consequences. (Backdating is not illegal by itself, but requires notice to shareholders and a charge to earnings, neither of which Apple undertook at the time it backdated options.)

Excellent journalistic work on Barrett's part. But here's the question: How did Forbes know precisely which document to ask for? It always helps to have well-connected sources. And it's hard to imagine who would be better placed to know the details of the case than Anderson.

Cha complains that reps for Sprint and Palm have shown the device off at trade shows, but won't actually let go. At all times, someone acting in their official capacity is hanging desperately onto the Pre, which it announced in January but has yet to release on the market.

Palm spokeswoman Lynn Fox, reached at a deli in New York after spending a day letting radio shock jock Howard Stern get both of his greasy mitts all over the Pre, explained that the company "didn't want to play a game of pass-the-device in a crowded room." She suggested but did not quite spell out the no-win prospect of wrestling the precious, Bono-funded device out of an deranged blogger's hands.

We think the policy is utterly wrongheaded. We can't think of better publicity than a gadget hound, surrounded by a crowd of flacks huffing and sighing, defying their disapproval to hold onto the Pre.

Anyone would be forgiven for thinking the Palm Pre, the long-overdue smartphone unveiled today in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show, is an obvious iPhone wannabe, with a similar shape, a touchscreen, and a fancy built-in Web browser.

It was built, too, by a cast of Apple hand-me-downs: Chairman Jon Rubinstein was formerly Jobs's right-hand man, and Palm's campaign of hiring away Apple employees grew so large, and so obvious, that Jobs is said to have called Rubinstein and screamed at him. Palm is backed by Elevation Partners, a private equity firm where former Apple CFO Fred Anderson now works. (The rivalry might explain why Jobs is no longer seen palling around with Bono, who's also a partner at Elevation.)

But the most glaring way in which Palm has rebuilt himself in Apple's image is in its executives' raging superiority complex. Take this exchange between AllThingsD blogger Peter Kafka and Palm CEO Ed Colligan:

The biggest unknown is price, which went unmentioned during the demo. My assumption is that Palm would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. “Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,” he asked, then walked away.

Jobs could not have put it better himself. But Palm, which has struggled for years, has far more to prove before Colligan and Rubinstein can act so cock of the walk.

(Photo by Corinne Schulze/CNET News)

Bono is a founder of Elevation Partners, the Silicon Valley private-equity firm named after the U2 song. And Elevation just sank another $100 million into Palm, the troubled smartphone maker. Palm, which waited too long to switch its product lineup from electronic organizers to souped-up cell phones and whose Treo smartphone is showing its age, lost more than $500 million in the most recent quarter. Bono's firm now owns 39 percent of Palm.

He's also lassoed several former Apple executives into the Palm corral. Fred Anderson, a former Apple CFO and board member, is an investor at Elevation. Jon Rubinstein, a hardware executive who served as Jobs's right-hand man at Apple, resigned in 2006 — one day before the company's 30-year anniversary — and joined Palm a year ago. Rubinstein, the company's executive chairman, is working on a new family of devices that will compete with Apple's iPhone; the big unveiling is planned for the CES computer trade show next month.

The last CES was also the scene of the latest dig by Bono at Jobs. In January 2008, he appeared in a farewell video for Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. Later that month, he shilled for Michael Dell, the founder of the eponymous PC maker who once called for Jobs to shut down Apple and "return the money to shareholders." (Apple is now worth far more than Dell. Ha!)

And to think they were once so close. At an Apple event in 2003, Bono called Jobs "the Dalai Lamai of integration." One year later, Bono and Jobs introduced a U2-branded edition of the iPod. Jobs, who is rarely seen in public, attended a U2 concert in 2005, and Bono praised Apple as being "more creative than a lot of rock bands." In 2006, Bono promoted a red iPod for his Product (Red) charity scheme.

So what happened? The falling out has never been publicly explained, but I have a theory on what happened.

Apple's board of directors fingered Fred Anderson, the former Apple CFO, in a probe over stock-options backdating at Apple. In a public statement, Anderson blamed Jobs. Things got messy, and Anderson resigned from the board after reaching a settlement with the SEC.

At that point, Anderson was already at Elevation helping make Bono, whose net worth is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars, even richer. So Jobs wasn't just messing with Bono's pal; he was messing with his pocketbook.

It hardly squares with the Irish rocker's saintly save-the-children image, does it?

Palm Pilots were the epitome of cutting-edge cool — in 1998. By 2004, when the movie came out, the PDA market had entered terminal decline, as people switched to keeping their contacts on increasingly advanced cell phones. And the best part?

Sony, whose movie studio released the film, exited the PDA business in early 2005. Not that electronics executives at the famously combative conglomerate would have ever tipped off their counterparts in Los Angeles.

The loss of Bell was apparently so intolerable to Jobs that Palm hasn't dared announce his hire publicly, though he's listed on the company's management page, and SEC filings reveal he's received stock in the company. A Palm spokeswoman says the company hasn't announced any new hires recently. That strikes me as an unlikely reason: The company is desperately in need of some good news, and wooing a top executive from Palm's most lethal rival in the smartphone market would seem to qualify.

Rubinstein left Apple in the spring of 2006, before the Air began serious development. But he'd presumably have sufficient contacts within Apple to get such a warning. It would explain a long-standing mystery: Why Palm killed the Foleo later, rather than sooner. Better to take the financial hit in September — Palm wrote off $10 million in Foleo R&D — than to face the inevitable comparisons to a far superior machine in January.

Sources told the Journal Rubinstein plans to develop a new Linux-based software platform to run apps on all of Palm's devices before the end of next year. And Rubinstein seems comfortable with addition by subtraction. The Journal says he "cleaned house" within a month of his arrival last summer. Still, the timing is tough for Palm engineers. "What a holiday gift," our source writes. "We're supposed to be told about severance tomorrow."

Smartphones running Symbian, Linux and Palm OS all fall behind Apple's iPhone. This is ever more stunning because the iPhone is only available via one carrier, in contrast, the other platforms can be procured from various cellular networks. This dramatically increases their market penetration. From the perspective of a business model, these figures are simply astronomical. Who's running scared? Apparently, Symbian is:

Every year, Symbian publishes detailed figures demonstrating how they are the biggest, baddest platform in the world. Guess what? This year, they didn't release the detailed figures on their Symbian Fast Facts webpage. Why not? Take a look at the image—the numbers are no longer working in their favor.

All in all, things aren't looking too perky for Apple's competitors. Sure, RIM may be flying high at the moment, but if this growth continues even at a fraction of the rate it is currently, RIM won't be high and dry for long. Android, in you we trust. For a fantastic run through the figures, and a more detailed look at the likely ramifications of Apple's impending dominance, checkout the full report by hitting the link. [Roughly Drafted Magazine]

Because an unspecified product didn't meet with a carrier's approval. Palm blames the misstep for a $30 million hit to this quarter's projected revenues). Rubinstein's influence may take years to find its way into actual phones. No consolation for those without jobs in the short term.