There is another plausible scenario. A company (Apple in this case) may be well down the road to developing a product with their own IP. They scout around to see if anyone else has something similar. They find such a product at a company and ask to meet. They check it out and find it is light years behind so they decline to take it further. Or they are so impressed they buy the company.
Hiring folks from various places for specific talent areas will likely mean some from the company they visited may apply to work for Apple.
Upon the release of the Apple product, the company visited by and lost staff to Apple, put 2 and 2 together, and get 5, and the media loves the evil interpretation.
I am not making this up; decades ago I owned a software company and was approached by Adobe, who tested our software for a few months and then declined to take it further. Later that year Adobe added a watered-down version of what our software had to Photoshop, and I could not help feeling at first that I'd been screwed, but I came to believe I was being paranoid.
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There is another plausible scenario. A company (Apple in this case) may be well down the road to developing a product with their own IP. They scout around to see if anyone else has something similar. They find such a product at a company and ask to meet. They check it out and find it is light years behind so they decline to take it further. Or they are so impressed they buy the company.
Hiring folks from various places for specific talent areas will likely mean some from the company they visited may apply to work for Apple.
Upon the release of the Apple product, the company visited by and lost staff to Apple, put 2 and 2 together, and get 5, and the media loves the evil interpretation.
I am not making this up; decades ago I owned a software company and was approached by Adobe, who tested our software for a few months and then declined to take it further. Later that year Adobe added a watered-down version of what our software had to Photoshop, and I could not help feeling at first that I'd been screwed, but I came to believe I was being paranoid.