Why the current meme for examining Steve's entrails? Is anyone surprised at this exchange? One of Steve's lifelong obsessions was a wildly distorted idea of employee poaching. As someone who worked at two different companies that received these kinds of communications from Steve, I can say that he usually only struck out at companies he knew well, like Palm. Ed probably doesn't know it, but Steve actually threatened Palm in much the same way years earlier. He did the same sputtering act about prceived poaching with Motorola around 2005, which took some stones, since at the same time he and his guys were busy playing MOT like a pinball machine to teach them how to make phones and how to do business with AT&T. But that's another story. In both these instances, lawyers were dutifully involved, but the execs involved mostly just laughed it off. Steve being Steve.