"Under the terms of that deal, though, Apple had to agree to a "marketing incentives agreement" to speak out against the WiMax standard that was popular at that time."
I once was sent to a standards committee meeting to support a bad proposal from an important customer (actually what they wanted to accomplish was a good idea, but how they wanted to go about it, based on the work they had already done, was most definitely a bad idea). We (the company) only did this because we knew the proposal would only get two or three votes, i.e. there was no risk of a bad proposal being adopted but we could show the customer we cared about them.
We later felt so bad about this that we determined never to do anything like that again. It was probably wrong even though no global harm was done.
I once was sent to a standards committee meeting to support a bad proposal from an important customer (actually what they wanted to accomplish was a good idea, but how they wanted to go about it, based on the work they had already done, was most definitely a bad idea). We (the company) only did this because we knew the proposal would only get two or three votes, i.e. there was no risk of a bad proposal being adopted but we could show the customer we cared about them.
We later felt so bad about this that we determined never to do anything like that again. It was probably wrong even though no global harm was done.