Worst of the Week: Tech engineers draw the short code

Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
News sprung recently that Silicon Valley heavyweights Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe had agreed to cough up $324 million to end a class-action lawsuit brought by engineers that claimed they had their income’s stymied by a secret-handshake agreement between those tech firms to not poach each other’s engineers.
The class-action included more than 64,000 engineers, which, according to my excellent skills at long division, means that each engineer will be able to retire with a hefty $5,000 each. Wow! Nothing kills a nice $324 million payment then having to share it with 64,000 of your engineering neighbors.
But, it could have been worse, right? I mean the lawyers for the engineers had initially asked for $3 billion, or basically the amount those four tech giant make every second. Plus, if for some reason those lawyers had done their job and actually managed to convince a court that $3 billion was indeed the amount that should have been paid, each member of the class-action would have received nearly $47,000.
Now, I am no expert on what tech engineers in Silicon Valley make, but I do have an idea on how much it costs to live anywhere in the vicinity of Silicon Valley and thus can deduce that $47,000 in that neck of the country is similar to $5,000 just about everywhere else.
Regardless of the actual outcome, the best part of this courtroom drama were the comments from the judge in the case – Judge Lucy Koh of Samsung/Apple fame – as reported by The New York Times. Koh stated that the documents presented to the court seemed to be “very significant and pretty compelling.” Koh, who I am guessing was supposed to be an impartial judge in the case, added that the defendants would have likely suffered some significant bad publicity should the case had gone to trial, noting a jury ““would have found these documents very significant and pretty compelling.”
The lawyers for the plaintiffs countered that they really did not have that strong of a case and that getting $5,000 for each plaintiff was actually pretty good. No word from the lawyers if they also will only be taking a $5,000 cut of the settlement. Oh right, according to the story, the plaintiff lawyers were set to make $81 million from the case.
Sure, engineers are the ones powering society’s high-tech revolution, but at the end of the day, it’s the lawyers that appear to be raking in the spoils.
OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
–Make sure this week to spill a drop of your favorite beverage onto your smartphone in respect for the seven-year anniversary of the launch of Apple’s iPhone.
Some have said that the success of the iPhone was not really down to any one specific feature, but instead was due to how Apple managed to incorporate an entire ecosystem into a single device. Web browser, music player, camera, application store, touch screen. There really was a lot going on in that first device. (Everything except 3G connectivity and being able to use it on anything else buy AT&T’s wireless network … zing!)
The iPhone even attempted to maintain what had been a growing industry push to embed value into mobile devices by placing a price tag on their purchase nearly in line with what they actually cost. Of course, that attempt did not last long as Apple quickly got on board with the device-subsidy-in-exchange-for-a-two-year-contract model and went on to sell so many iPhones that they had to make up a new name for all those zeros: Applillion.
But, for me, the one feature that put the iPhone over the top was that touch screen. Apple was not the first to offer up the ability for consumers to actually touch something on a screen and make something happen, but it seemed to be the first to partner a touch screen technology that did not require the user to literally poke through the screen to make something happen with an operating system that encouraged users to get all touchy-feely with their new best friend.
Of course, this advancement also spelled the end for what was/is/will always be the best feature on a mobile device: a physical keyboard.
You see, once Apple had brought out a screen that customers could just tappity-tap-tap-tap on, the physical keyboard – and Research In Motion/BlackBerry/Palm – were doomed. It was/is a funny dooming as well because it’s nearly impossible to find anyone over the age of 18 who does not prefer a real, physical keyboard to typing on a screen, yet, it’s the desire for every device maker to cater to that under-18 crowd that has doomed the keyboard. Did I mention, doom?
It’s also nearly impossible to find anyone over the age of 18 that would give up one square inch of their current mobile device screen as it appears that the older one gets, the less one can see what the heck they are actually typing. Sort of funny that way.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
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