Earlier today, Apple announced that Mark Papermaster will become their Senior Vice President of Devices Hardware Engineering on April 24th. As such, he'll hold the reigns of the iPod and iPhone engineering departments.

As you may remember, Papermaster was recently involved in a lawsuit when IBM stated that his accepting the position would be a violation of their own noncompetitive agreement, citing fears that he'd divulge IBM trade secrets once inside 1 Infinite Loop. The case was finally settled, and while Apple has declined to comment on the details, IBM told CNET:

"IBM and Mr. Papermaster have now agreed on a resolution of the lawsuit under which Mr. Papermaster may not begin employment with Apple until April 24, 2009, six months after leaving IBM, and will remain subject thereafter to all of his contractual and other legal duties to IBM, including the obligation not to use or disclose IBM's confidential information."

Apple started courting Papermaster in 2008, and he finally made the jump to "...the opportunity of a lifetime." Good luck, Mark!

[Via Daring Fireball]

Apple's quest to replace outgoing iPod and iPhone VP Tony Fadell has run into a major roadblock: a federal district judge has granted IBM an injunction, forbidding former IBMer Mark Papermaster from joining Apple's ranks, at least for now.

The story is a classic HR nightmare. According to a timeline at Fortune's Apple 2.0 blog, once he was offered a "once in a lifetime" position at Apple, Papermaster indicated he was going to resign at IBM. IBM executives then offered Papermaster a "substantial increase" in pay to entice him to stay. Papermaster declined, and quit.

The next day, IBM filed their suit with the Southern District of New York, alleging that Papermaster is in violation of the non-compete clause of his employment contract.

Papermaster claims in a counter-filing that Apple and IBM are in two totally different businesses: The former a consumer products company, the latter a high-end server manufacturer. Uh huh.

Pundit Robert X. Cringely speculates that tapping Papermaster for the iPod/iPhone job was duplicitous, and Apple intends to move Papermaster into the lead position at the newly-acquired PA Semi division once the yearlong non-compete clause of his IBM contract expires.

Apple said in a statement to Reuters that Apple "... will comply with the court's order but are confident that Mark Papermaster will be able to ultimately join Apple when the dust settles."

According to a press release issued by Apple this morning, two Apple vice presidents are leaving the company for personal reasons, "as they devote more time to their young family."

iPod division senior vice president Tony Fadell and his wife, Danielle Lambert, vice president of human resources, will "reduce their roles" at Apple. Lambert will stay until the end of the year to transition to a successor.

"Tony and Dani have each made important contributions to Apple over the past eight years. We're sorry to see Dani go, and are looking forward to working with Tony in his new capacity," said Steve Jobs in the press release.

Former IBM chip executive Mark Papermaster will be joining Apple later this month to replace Fadell, and will gain the new title of Senior Vice President of Devices Hardware Engineering. He's expected to bring his 25 years of experience to Apple's server technologies, as well.

Papermaster unfortunately arrives with some baggage: IBM filed suit against Papermaster attempting to forbid him from taking his knowledge of the Power chip architecture to other companies.

IBM said in a statement to CNET that "Mr. Papermaster's employment by Apple is a violation of his agreement with IBM against working for a competitor should he leave IBM. We will vigorously pursue this case in court."

[Via MacDailyNews.]

Is Big Blue about to go Mac?

Well, not really. Roughly Drafted Magazine has obtained a document which describes a pilot program at IBM that has employees using Macs for their day-to-day work. Now, they aren't looking to ditch Windows in favor of Mac OS entirely. Instead, IBM wants to have diverse operating systems available to employees. From the document:

"Research is focusing on providing an IBM application stack on multiple Operating Systems, rather than be confined to one or the other."

At the end of the program's first phase, a full 86% of participants asked to keep their Macs, leaving comments like "It has been easier learning the Mac than learning Vista" and "Getting wireless running was a piece of cake on the Mac, much simpler than the PC" (amen to that, brother). Of course, this is probably an easier sell now that IBM doesn't make PCs any more.

Someone cue the chick with the sledgehammer.

[Via Infinite Loop]

According to Information Week, sources "with knowledge of IBM's plans" have confirmed that IBM will be releasing a version of its email client, Lotus Notes, for the iPhone (and iPod touch) at the Lotusphere conference next week. Plans for this were announced in October last year after Steve Jobs announced an iPhone SDK coming in February. Notes has been previously available on your Mac, but this release would give iPhone users mobile access to all of the Notes tools, including e-mail, calendars and databases.

The Notes news, along with IBM's Wednesday announcement that it will be porting its Informix 11 'Cheetah' database server to Leopard, and reports that Symphony (the productivity suite based on the OpenOffice.org project) is headed for OS X give rise to speculation that IBM may be gearing up to take a bite out of Microsoft via some strategic partnering with Apple. And for Apple, support from IBM could lead to gaining ground in the enterprise arena. Would more IBM software on the Mac (and iPhone) cause a stir in the Microsoft-dominated business world? I guess we're about to find out.

We first blogged about Lotus Note's Mac support in January of this year, and now it would seem IBM has fully delivered on the promise. As eWEEK reports Lotus Notes 7.02 offers full OS X support (10.4.2 or higher is required) and it is Universal so both PPC Macs and Intel Macs can share in the love. As you can see from the screenshot above Lotus Note's UI still looks like IBM software, but it looks like that on Windows, Linux, and OS X which is important. Not only is the client supported on the Mac, but Lotus Notes Web Access now works on the Mac as well, which I am sure is good news for people who use Macs at home.

Check out IBM's website for more details and screenshots of Lotus Notes running on Tiger.

In the news today, Apple announced that Donald J. Rosenberg, senior vice president and general counsel of IBM, will be moving to Apple to take over similar duties there. "We're thrilled to welcome such a seasoned professional to our executive team," said Steve Jobs, according to today's Apple press release. "Don has a broad range of experience that includes litigation, securities, intellectual property and antitrust, and he will be responsible for overseeing all legal matters and government affairs for Apple."

TUAW is curious to see how Mr. Rosenberg handles the matter of the messy $85 million in stock options recently discussed on this weblog.

Adrien Lamothe, writing for ONLamp.com, thinks that Apple has gotten itself into a position where their real competition isn't the likes of Dell but rather Sony and IBM. Is he referring to Sony's VAIO series of machines? Nope, he thinks that the Playstation III which will sport IBM's Cell processor will blow Macs out of the water.

Somehow, I doubt it considering that the Playstation, while computer like, has been designed to be a gaming machine. Want to do all your Internet surfer via your game console? I don't.

I know what you're thinking. Both me and fellow blogger Dave Caolo were asking each other the same question: "Lotus Notes still exists?"

But seriously, if there is a sign of the times - especially corporate times - this could certainly be one of them: IBM will announce at Lotusphere next week that the next client version of their Lotus Notes software will support OS X (while version 6.5 of Lotus Notes supports 10.3, version 7 doesn't support OS X at all). They will also be announcing support for Intel-based Macs, due later this year. As reasoning for this newfound OS X support, a representative for an IBM partner is quoted in an InformationWeek article saying: "We have a lot of health-care customers and maybe 1 percent of a company’s research department is on Macs but they have 99 percent of the influence."

The article also contains speculation from industry observers that this new friendliness IBM has for Apple's software is actually a renewal of a partnership the two companies had in the early nineties, when they jointly worked on "Pink," an object-oriented OS built to take on Windows. Apparently, it failed. With a name like "Pink," you only get three guesses as to why.

On a broader scale though, I'm hopeful for more business and corporate support for our favorite fruity computers, as it would be great for more people to be able to chose a productive computer in the workplace.

[via MacNN]