We live in changing times.
Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, former Microsoft, jumps ship to Google, lawsuits fly, injunctions for everybody. Nothing new here, right? Typically when both sides get handed a judgment from the court, the lawyers stand on the steps and say, we are delighted or disappointed.. Right, standard stuff.
Not this time and not in the era we live in.
Consider one Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel to Google. She has a blog entry that is entitled: Judge clears the way for Dr. Lee.
She spins it as a victory using choice quotes from the judge like:
The judge said that Microsoft had "not sufficiently shown that it has a clear legal or equitable right to enjoin Dr. Lee, pending trial, from Establishing and Staffing a Google Development Facility Center.
Well, gee Mzz Wong, let’s take a quick peek on what the judge actually said about your new employee:
In its findings of fact, the court said Lee misled Microsoft about his intention to return to the software company from a sabbatical and that he was instead contacted and hired by Google. The court also said Lee assisted Google while he was still employed at Microsoft.
"Dr. Lee confused the difference between the discretion given him to disclose Microsoft's confidential information for the benefit of Microsoft and disclosing Microsoft's confidential information for his own benefit or the benefit of another," the order said.
That would be a finding of FACT. (above snip is from the CNET story.) Microsoft says, works for us, the injunction as it stands, works for us, do it until June of 2006 and we’re all done in court.
A Google lawyer is spinning a court ruling that says a PhD level employee mislead his former employer and helped his new employer while still on the payroll of the previous employer. “Clears the way” is not exactly true if you read the fairly tight restrictions with Microsoft basically being happy that the order “"reduces him to being, at least until the outcome of trial, the most highly compensated HR (human resources) manager ever.”
I personally don’t care one way or the other so no flames pro/con Microsoft or Google.
I just find it interesting that lawyers are now with blogs commenting on cases have become public spin machines, Google is fine with a new hire that has a finding of fact laid on em with regard to misleading the paycheck provider, and we have all of this playing right out in public, direct to an RSS reader near you.
Amazing.
Not too surprising that Nicole got this wrong. I'm not sure she's spinning it though. I think it's more likely, given her level of legal abilities, that she just really didn't understand the decision.
Posted by: Ed Wes | September 14, 2005 at 05:14
How very interesting. Groklaw -- after looking at the actual court filings, rather than merely the news stories about them -- claims completely the opposite from what you claim; they say this is indeed a good outcome for Google. (Reference: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050914004312490) You can read that for details; it sounds convincing to me. I won't comment further on the case itself, except that it sounds like Microsoft is doing a rather significant lot of spinning, too.
On the subject of things actually on-topic, though, I think it's interesting to compare the two company's approaches to the spinning, and what worked and what didn't. Google's doing spin by blogger here; Microsoft's doing spin by press releases, and by actually talking to the reporters, which Google -- in the case of CNet -- isn't.
It appears that, judging based on who convinced you that their spin was truth, Microsoft (with the traditional methods) won, and Google (with blogging) lost.
Posted by: Brooks Moses | September 14, 2005 at 18:19