[btilly]

I believe that the companies in question would not have liked having a similar agreement with Facebook and Twitter. But it was not in the interest of Facebook or Twitter to agree to it. Therefore no meeting of the minds was possible.

I also believe that collusion was made much easier by the existing good relationships you refer to.

Where we may part ways is on what the execs were saying to themselves. I don't think it was just about maintaining good relations. I believe it was about reducing the cost of having to replace key institutional knowledge. It is worth skipping out on raw talent (that will need training) if it results in keeping key people.

Which brings us back to my point. Microsoft, Oracle and Yahoo do not have good reputations among tech people. So they are not major threats to losing institutional knowledge. And they are a great source of candidates. So it isn't in the interests of Apple, Google, etc to extend the agreement to those companies.

Kind of the same problem that kept it from happening with Facebook, but with the roles reversed.