Cold War Hiring - New comment on Stirring the Microsoft Comment Pot on a Rainy Wee....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Stirring the Microsoft Comment Pot on a Rainy Wee...":

Maybe our hiring binge is our way of cutting off Google's air supply? Nothing else seems to work, so Steve probably thought "lets suck out the oxygen from the atmosphere and hope they die".

We used a similar tactic after the old Soviet Union broke up. We paid their nuclear scientists a decent salary by soviet standards to stay at home and work on some meaningless tasks rather than having them go and work for Iran or Libya for a much higher salary. Most of the scientist would have left since the only choice was starvation in the early 90s in Russia. It was much cheaper for the US to pay their salaries or to bribe a dictator than the cost of fighting a war.