Palm Hires Another Former Apple Employee for its Management Team

PreCentral reports that Palm has recently hired former Apple employee Jeff Zwerner as its Senior Vice President of Brand Design.

We'd be remiss if we didn't mention that Zwerner, according to his LinkedIn page, has twice been in the employ of Apple - once as the Creative Director for Packaging in 2001-2003 and earlier as a Senior Art Director from 1995-1996. Sure, it's probably likely that some large proportion of people who work in Brand Design in California did a stint at Apple at some point, but nevertheless this is one more Palm executive with Apple experience.

Zwerner later founded the San Francisco office of Factor Design, where he provided brand and design consulting services to a wide array of major companies, including Apple.

An intense rivalry between Palm and Apple has developed over the past several years as former Apple executives John Rubinstein and Fred Anderson, as well as a number of other former Apple employees, have played key roles in rebuilding Palm with the development of the Palm Pre and its webOS operating system.

On a conference call in January several weeks after the Pre's announcement, Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook made what was viewed as veiled threats against Palm regarding multi-touch and other intellectual property claimed by Apple that has appeared in similar forms in the Pre. Palm and Apple have also continued to spar over the Pre's ability to sync media directly from iTunes by presenting itself as an iPod in its vendor and device identification codes.