Documents filed in conjunction with the litigation, first reported last month by PandoDaily's Mark Ames, offer a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse of interactions among the likes of Apple's Steve Jobs, Google's Eric Schmidt, and Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell. In early 2005, the documents show, Campbell brokered an anti-recruitment pact between Jobs and Schmidt, confirming to Jobs in an email that "Schmidt got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple." On the day of that email, Apple's head of human resources ordered her staff to "please add Google to your 'hands off' list." Likewise, Google's recruiting director was asked to create a formal "Do Not Cold Call List" of companies with which it had "special agreements" not to compete for employees. A few months later, Schmidt instructed a fellow exec not to discuss the no-call list other than "verbally," he wrote in an email, "since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?"

It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. Even though the iPhone wouldn’t go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous. The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.