Apple's Color Labs Acquisition Involves Only Color's Engineering Team

I know profits are <cough> tight these days but perhaps Apple can grow the OSX team from 2 people to 3 now?

OMG! They are buying people!

Now that Apple has bought the greatest color team in the industry, they'll get to work inventing a new color, fyornk, that'll be the most innovative, magical color in the rainbow.

Samsung will, of course, copy. But all they'll be able to produce is a cheap off-yellow color that only poor people will buy.

Dang, they must have some skillz.

Serious? This is the best you could come up with?

I have a feeling that we're going to see a social media YouTube-like site coming from Apple. Between this and Particle, it seems possible.

OMG! They are buying people!

Almost literally. If I were on that team, and Apple paid $2-5M for the team, I'd want a share of that cash.

Between 20 people comes out to between $100K - $200K each.

Almost literally. If I were on that team, and Apple paid $2-5M for the team, I'd want a share of that cash.

Between 20 people comes out to between $100K - $200K each.

I guess it depends what the deal was and how much the employees got out it... There's not much to stop Apple from saying to all their employees: if all 20 of you quit and join us, we'll give a $150k sign-up bonus to each (maybe throw a million to the company as goodwill, so they won't put up a fuss).

... sorta like an employee Groupon: buy all 20 and the deal's on!

Looks like some kind of iCloud based video offering is on the cards.

But designed by an engineering team who don't seem to have ever put together something anyone liked :-(

It's worth mentioning, since I didn't see it elsewhere

Like in yesterday's news post perhaps...

It's worth mentioning, since I didn't see it elsewhere, that Lala (Bill Nguyen's previous venture) was also purchased by Apple back in 2009

Almost literally. If I were on that team, and Apple paid $2-5M for the team, I'd want a share of that cash.

Between 20 people comes out to between $100K - $200K each.

Not even remotely literally. Color had a software engineering division. These employees worked for that division. Apple acquired the division. These employees still work for that division. (They have the same option to leave during or after the acquisition as they did before the acquisition.)

The difference between doing things this way and individually hiring the employees amounts to both parties getting to ignore any non-compete agreements the engineers may have signed, and a simplification of the paperwork involved for each employee brought over this way. (At the expense of a single set of additional paperwork for the acquisition itself.)

It boggles my mind that people either don't understand this (or simply don't know what "literally" means), but feel the need to make broad, unfounded, rediculous statements anyway.

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I'd venture a guess that a company that has roughly $25M in cash on the books with total employees of <30 is hardly sinking.

Given that they supposedly had a $41M initial round of venture capital, if they aren't actively sinking, they certainly seem to be taking on a lot of water. :D