The Unsettling Legacy of Google's Apple Affair In 2006, Google's senior vice president of engineering, Alan Eustace, exchanged a series of emails with Steve Jobs over the hiring of Jean Marie Hullot, a French engineer who had previously worked at Apple.
These exchanges reveal a level of deference and subservience that is striking, not just for their content but also for the implications they hold about the tech industry's power dynamics.
Eustace essentially requested Jobs' permission to hire Hullot, assuring him that his new employee would not harm Apple or its interests.