You make it sound like doing the right thing caused the downfall of Palm but I don't think there's any evidence of that. Being evil doesn't automatically make your products better.
I think the point is that being evil (especially in illegal ways) should be discouraged by society _regardless_ of whether it's successful. The issue isn't that this specific good guy lost, it's that the bad guy faced no repercussions. If this good guy still wouldn't have won, there still could have been a different good guy to come along.
That is just cost of business. I like the EU approach but the US will never adopt it. Scale the fines up to percentages of global revenue. That would definitely stifle some of these abuses.
The DoJ reached settlements with 8 different companies and there was a civil penalty too. Whether the repercussions were enough is a valid question, but Jobs was dead by the time the civil action was ruled on and on medical leave when the DoJ settlement in 2011 took place, so it’s hard to play a “what if” game here — especially since these lawsuits and DoJ investigations (correctly) caused tech companies to have to change their policies.
But Apple’s egregious no-poach agreements and collusion with other companies to do the same didn’t cause Palm’s collapse. And being able to more easily hire Apple employees wouldn’t have saved Palm.
The repercussions Apple faced were essentially insignificant to them as a company. The money they had to pay was a drop in the bucket, and having to stop doing something illegal is not a punishment for the illegal thing; it's literally what everyone who didn't do anything illegal has already been doing the whole time!
As I said before, the issue to me isn't whether Palm would have been successful without the illegal activity, it's whether Apple would have been as successful as they were.
