“Avie and I worked closely together at Apple for many years and I have always admired his engineering talent and leadership, his strategic vision for how software can transform businesses and his ability to execute on that vision,” Elevation co-founder Fred Anderson said in a statement. “We are proud that he has decided to join Elevation and believe he will be a huge asset as we explore new investment opportunities.”

Indeed. Tevanian, who spent nearly a decade leading Apple’s software engineering efforts before leaving in 2006, came to the company from Steve Jobs’s Next Computer, where he helped build the NeXTSTEP operating system, an early precursor of the current Mac OS.

I can’t imagine that Apple (AAPL) is at all happy about Tevanian’s latest career choice.

By enlisting with Elevation, Tevanian joins a group of Palm-backing Apple alums that includes Palm (PALM) Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein, formerly Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering; Senior VP of Product Development Mike Bell, former SVP of product development at Apple; Senior Apple Designer Jeff Zwerner; VP of Public Relations Lynn Fox, who once headed up Mac PR for the Cupertino, Calif., company; and, of course, board member Fred Anderson, who served as Apple’s CFO from 1996 to 2004.

Image credit: Que Nerd

Jeff Zwerner, who did stints at Apple as both senior art director and creative director for packaging, has signed on at Palm (PALM) as senior vice president of brand design.

Zwerner joins Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein, formerly Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering; Senior VP of Product Development Mike Bell, former SVP of product development at Apple (AAPL); VP of Public Relations Lynn Fox, who once headed up Mac PR for the Cupertino, Calif., company; and board member Fred Anderson, who served as Apple’s CFO from 1996 to 2004.

Quite a collection. And it doesn’t include rank-and-file employees who’ve train-hopped from Cupertino to Sunnyvale. Seems Palm’s makeover isn’t so much a reinvention as a reimagining of the company as a sort of paint-by-numbers version of Apple.

On Wednesday, AAPL sold off on news that the company, CEO Steve Jobs, former CFO Fred Anderson, former general counsel Nancy Heinen and several Apple board members were hit with a purported class-action lawsuit in federal court in San Jose related to the company’s stock-options backdating scandal. Shareholder lawsuits always sound scary, but there’s nothing to this that holders don’t already know: the company admitted that some options were backdated, but both Apple and Jobs have avoided any federal prosecution. Anderson settled SEC charges related to the situation; litigation by the Commission against Heinen is pending.

Read the rest of this post

1. Yahoo Shareholders Reject Plan to Tie Executive Compensation to Company’s Crappy Performance
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2. I Know It Was You, Fredo. You Broke My Heart. You Broke My Heart!
   Apparently, Fred Anderson is the “Fredo” of the Apple options backdating family.

3. We’ve Asked John Williams to Do a Special Performance of the Theme From “The Poseidon Adventure” for Our Q4 Results
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8. War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength. DRM Is DCE.
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11. How Would Monsieur Ellison Like His BEA Served? Mixed in a Bucket With Oracle’s Other Acquisitions?
    Looks like we may be in for another PeopleSoft-esque takeover drama …

12. I’m Just Biding My Time Here Until I Can Quit and Study Whale Feces Full Time
    Given the chance, how would you alter the course of your career? Well, if you worked at Microsoft’s Security Response Center, you might consider taking a job as an Olympic drug tester, a gravity research subject, or a “whale-feces researcher.”

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15. The Defendant Stands Accused of Copyright Infringement, Breach of Contract and Misappropriation of Dumb Luck
    According to popular legend Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once kept two versions of his business card in his wallet–one with the title CEO, the other with “I’M CEO . . . BITCH.”

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    Google’s apparently finished “educating users about copyright law” and has moved on to the far more important business of making sure not to run afoul of it.

17. Look at It This Way: Now That Yahoo’s an ‘Ecosystem,’ the EPA Can Finally Declare It a Superfund Site
    “Our financial performance is not what we would like to see long-term.” This, from Blake Jorgensen, Yahoo’s chief financial officer who, just six weeks into the job, is already well versed in the company’s fiscal truisms.

18. Gates to Google: My Lyrical Technique Will Leave Your Body Weak
    Much as Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates fancies himself untroubled by Google’s incursions into his software empire, they clearly do chafe him a bit.

19. Newest Yahoo Mail Feature: BCC Beijing
    Sure, Yahoo signed China’s “Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry,” a voluntary agreement to monitor and restrict information deemed “harmful” by Beijing, but did it have to take it quite so seriously?

20. Apple: Wham, Bam, Thank You Fanboi
    “I feel like a $200 whore.” That was one iPhone early adopter’s crass assessment of his feelings of self-worth, after Apple unexpectedly cut the price of the device by a third–just two months after it arrived at market.

21. In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing, Sergey’s California King May Be Used as a Flotation Device
    With its onboard hammocks, full-size sofas and California King beds, it’s a wonder Google’s “party plane” has room for scientific instrumentation befitting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but apparently it does.

22. Act Now and Get a Downgrade to the OS You Really Want, ABSOLUTELY FREE!
    It’s looking more and more like the pent-up demand for Windows Vista we’ve heard so much about this past year is really just pent-up demand for Windows XP.

23. Dude, I Work for Friggin Forbes Magazine. Have You Heard of It?
    The year-long guessing game is over. New York Times reporter Brad Stone has outed Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes magazine, as the author of the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, the satirical blog lampooning Apple’s iconic CEO (See? Told you it wasn’t me).

24. If Facebook’s Worth $15 Billion, Then My Stupid Idea’s Got to Be Good for $10 Mil
    Apparently the vainglory from which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to suffer is communicable and spreading rapidly throughout the social network’s developer community.

25. A Billion Here, a Billion There, and Pretty Soon You’re Talking Real Bollocks
    MySpace is worth $65 billion in the same way that Facebook is worth $15 billion–hypothetically.

26. “Apple Has Destroyed the Music Business”–Not That We Didn’t Try Our Best
    Many, many years ago, when the digital-music business consisted of little else besides Napster and the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuits against it, Apple proved that there was indeed a decent business to be had in selling music online for $1 per song.

27. It’s Not an Unpaid Endorsement, It’s a “Social Ad”
    Facebook’s Social Ads aren’t endorsements, they’re a “representation” of user activity.

28. Obama Announces “No Tech Policy Left Behind” Plan
    If Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s is to do the same to its tech-policy issues.

29. Sounds More Like the “Zune of Reading” to Me
    If Jeff Bezos truly hopes to create “the iPod of reading,” observers say he’s going to have to do a hell of a lot better than Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader.

30. Fiascobook
    What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lacks in foresight, he certainly makes up for in disingenuous hair-shirt remorse.

1. Yahoo Shareholders Reject Plan to Tie Executive Compensation to Company’s Crappy Performance
   Well, what do you know: Yahoo’s annual shareholder meeting didn’t conclude with CEO Terry Semel’s head piked on the exclamation point of the Yahoo sign outside company headquarters.

2. I Know It Was You, Fredo. You Broke My Heart. You Broke My Heart!
   Apparently, Fred Anderson is the “Fredo” of the Apple options backdating family.

3. We’ve Asked John Williams to Do a Special Performance of the Theme From “The Poseidon Adventure” for Our Q4 Results
   Who’s programming Microsoft’s on-hold music, Apple’s Phil Schiller? Waiting for the company’s third-quarter earnings call to begin yesterday, those listening in were treated to an instrumental piano version of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” From “Titanic,” the disaster movie.

4. I’m Proud to Say Our New “Soylent Green” iPod Is Made of 100% Biodegradable Greenpeace Activists!
   If you’re going to try to smear Apple for reckless environmental practices, you best have some hard epidemiological and toxicological data on hand, because goofy Photoshop treatments of the company’s marketing materials just can’t stand up to a blow from the Apple PR machine.

5. And Online Display Impressions Soared as More Americans Checked Their AOL Accounts for Old Times’ Sake
   To hear tell from Time Warner executives, the company’s better-than-expected earnings for the first quarter owed quite a bit to gains in online-advertising market share by its AOL Internet division.

6. Web 2.0 Audience in Mirror May Be Smaller Than It Appears
   How ironic is it that Web 2.0–the “participatory Web”–has far fewer participants than its architects would have us believe?

7. And for My Next Trick, I’ll Turn Myself Into a Complete Jackass
   If you’re going to demand that YouTube remove a video to which you object under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s probably wise to make sure that you actually understand the DMCA.

8. War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength. DRM Is DCE.
   You can’t put frosting on manure, but HBO’s Chief Technology Officer Bob Zitter isn’t above trying.

9. We’re Naming It the Motorola STNKR, After Our Q1 Earnings …
   Carl Icahn was right. Motorola really is desperate for a new product. How else to explain a patent the company was awarded last month for a “communication device having a scent-release feature and method thereof.”

10. The Frienemy of My Frienemy Is My Enemiend
    If Microsoft is planning an acquisition in the online marketing and advertising space, it better act fast, because if it waits much longer there won’t be anything left to acquire.

11. How Would Monsieur Ellison Like His BEA Served? Mixed in a Bucket With Oracle’s Other Acquisitions?
    Looks like we may be in for another PeopleSoft-esque takeover drama …

12. I’m Just Biding My Time Here Until I Can Quit and Study Whale Feces Full Time
    Given the chance, how would you alter the course of your career? Well, if you worked at Microsoft’s Security Response Center, you might consider taking a job as an Olympic drug tester, a gravity research subject, or a “whale-feces researcher.”

13. Much Like Energy, BS Cannot Be Created or Destroyed, It Can Only Be Changed From One Form to Another
    If Steorn’s perpetual motion effort is anything like its e-commerce venture (and by all accounts things do seem to be going that way), the only thing in its future is insolvency.

14. From Now On, We’ll Be Known as Nlsn/NtRtings
    Looks like vowels won’t be the only accoutrements to be tossed aside in the rise of Web 2.0. The venerable page view is to be abandoned as well.

15. The Defendant Stands Accused of Copyright Infringement, Breach of Contract and Misappropriation of Dumb Luck
    According to popular legend Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once kept two versions of his business card in his wallet–one with the title CEO, the other with “I’M CEO . . . BITCH.”

16. Well, Here Come YouTube’s Video ID Tools. Guess That Means Godot Will Be Here Any Minute Now
    Google’s apparently finished “educating users about copyright law” and has moved on to the far more important business of making sure not to run afoul of it.

17. Look at It This Way: Now That Yahoo’s an ‘Ecosystem,’ the EPA Can Finally Declare It a Superfund Site
    “Our financial performance is not what we would like to see long-term.” This, from Blake Jorgensen, Yahoo’s chief financial officer who, just six weeks into the job, is already well versed in the company’s fiscal truisms.

18. Gates to Google: My Lyrical Technique Will Leave Your Body Weak
    Much as Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates fancies himself untroubled by Google’s incursions into his software empire, they clearly do chafe him a bit.

19. Newest Yahoo Mail Feature: BCC Beijing
    Sure, Yahoo signed China’s “Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry,” a voluntary agreement to monitor and restrict information deemed “harmful” by Beijing, but did it have to take it quite so seriously?

20. Apple: Wham, Bam, Thank You Fanboi
    “I feel like a $200 whore.” That was one iPhone early adopter’s crass assessment of his feelings of self-worth, after Apple unexpectedly cut the price of the device by a third–just two months after it arrived at market.

21. In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing, Sergey’s California King May Be Used as a Flotation Device
    With its onboard hammocks, full-size sofas and California King beds, it’s a wonder Google’s “party plane” has room for scientific instrumentation befitting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but apparently it does.

22. Act Now and Get a Downgrade to the OS You Really Want, ABSOLUTELY FREE!
    It’s looking more and more like the pent-up demand for Windows Vista we’ve heard so much about this past year is really just pent-up demand for Windows XP.

23. Dude, I Work for Friggin Forbes Magazine. Have You Heard of It?
    The year-long guessing game is over. New York Times reporter Brad Stone has outed Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes magazine, as the author of the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, the satirical blog lampooning Apple’s iconic CEO (See? Told you it wasn’t me).

24. If Facebook’s Worth $15 Billion, Then My Stupid Idea’s Got to Be Good for $10 Mil
    Apparently the vainglory from which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to suffer is communicable and spreading rapidly throughout the social network’s developer community.

25. A Billion Here, a Billion There, and Pretty Soon You’re Talking Real Bollocks
    MySpace is worth $65 billion in the same way that Facebook is worth $15 billion–hypothetically.

26. “Apple Has Destroyed the Music Business”–Not That We Didn’t Try Our Best
    Many, many years ago, when the digital-music business consisted of little else besides Napster and the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuits against it, Apple proved that there was indeed a decent business to be had in selling music online for $1 per song.

27. It’s Not an Unpaid Endorsement, It’s a “Social Ad”
    Facebook’s Social Ads aren’t endorsements, they’re a “representation” of user activity.

28. Obama Announces “No Tech Policy Left Behind” Plan
    If Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s is to do the same to its tech-policy issues.

29. Sounds More Like the “Zune of Reading” to Me
    If Jeff Bezos truly hopes to create “the iPod of reading,” observers say he’s going to have to do a hell of a lot better than Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader.

30. Fiascobook
    What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lacks in foresight, he certainly makes up for in disingenuous hair-shirt remorse.

And that puts Jobs in an uncomfortable position. Because while Apple has cleared him of any wrongdoing, former Apple CFO Fred “It was you, Fredo” Anderson did try to implicate him in the scandal (Post continues after video … ).

Though Apple dismissed Anderson’s accusations as the ravings of a madman, they’re still not the sort of thing you want hanging over you when you’re testifying before an SEC panel. Because though the agency has said it will take no action against Apple, it hasn’t ruled out continued scrutiny of Jobs.

Roger McNamee is very bullish on the iPhone. “It’s the most exciting thing in years,” said the longtime Silicon Valley investor. “With Apple’s identity, I think it will be spectacularly successful.”

This, of course, is an interesting product for McNamee to cheer for. Because last week, Elevation Partners, the high-profile private-equity firm that counts McNamee and also U2 singer Bono among its partners, sunk $325 million of its $1.9 billion fund to buy one-quarter of Palm. The maker of the Treo smart phone, of course, could take a big hit if the iPhone lives up to its hype and dominates the market for high-end, heavily featured mobile devices.

Still, McNamee, whom I interviewed here a few weeks ago, keeps reeling off a bunch of non-Palm smart phones he loves–he tries all of them and often wears several in high-tech style (not!) on his belt.

“I loved the BlackBerry Pearl, and Motorola and Samsung have done some cool stuff and I liked a lot of the features on Helio’s new Ocean,” he said. “And that iPhone will probably be a huge hit does not bother me at all, because this is not a zero-sum game.”

McNamee’s theory is simple–although only a small percentage of all phones sold are smart phones, he expects that to eventually be 100%, because, he posits, “in the end, what matters is what you carry on your body.”

So, even if Palm, which is a small player compared to competitors like Nokia and BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion, comes in third or fourth, that, said McNamee, is “not so bad.”

Not that he expects that kind of also-run status for Elevation’s investment. So to help buoy Palm, along with the big pile of cash, he will also join the board and has brought in two former Apple executives, too–former CFO Fred Anderson and former hardware head (think iPod) Jon Rubinstein.

Anderson is also a partner at Elevation and Rubinstein will serve as executive chairman and also run product development at Palm.

“We offer committed value insight and want to be a partner to management and shareholders, but, most of all, we want to help foster a culture of radical innovation,” said McNamee. “I am a huge believer that you have to be able to experiment to be able to innovate and you even need permission to do so.”

The $325 million buys a lot of permission, of course, and was, said McNamee, an unexpected opportunity. The deal was hatched about seven months ago, when McNamee was called by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, who was seeking good advice about Palm’s options.

While McNamee admits he was not a regular user of Palm products, although he did try them out, he was impressed by Palm’s years of large accomplishments compared to its size.

Nonetheless, the company has been under a lot of pressure to perform better and also do something to lift its lagging stock price. With a huge hoard of cash and even the possibility of being sold to a bigger player, Palm was receptive when McNamee proposed a different tack.

Under terms of the new restructuring deal, still to be approved, Palm’s existing shareholders will get almost $1 billion in cash (the money from Elevation, some new debt and cash from Palm’s kitty) to drop their stake to 75%.

What McNamee said he is buying is a company great at both software and also hardware, which he thinks need to become even more tightly integrated to make products seamless.

“All the really successful products are like that, because someone has to take responsibility for the whole thing,” said McNamee. “And product change has to be the rule rather than the exception… with the goal, of course, to have an incredible device everyone wants to own.”

That might be the goal, but Palm’s latest device, unveiled at D5 last week by Palm’s co-founder and top product guru Jeff Hawkins, called the Foleo, was not well received.

The “phone companion”–which sounded naughty to me when I heard it described thus–was thought by many I spoke with to be too large and not feature-rich enough to be useful.

McNamee understands this, but said Foleo was only a starting point. “It is a good thing for a company to try new form factors, and Foleo is an excellent first step,” he said, even though he admitted the device probably does not represent a very big market.

But he liked the effort involved in its conception.

“Innovation is not a matter of always hitting a bulls-eye on the first shot,” he said. “So I hope we’re there to help Palm be able to keep trying.”

Steve and Fred were great buddies from 1997
to 2004.”

That’s what Charles Wolf, president of Wolf Insights, had to say yesterday about former Apple CFO Fred Anderson and the sucker punch he threw at CEO Steve Jobs yesterday (see “I Know It Was You, Fredo. You Broke My Heart. You Broke My Heart!” and “Digital Daily Video 2007.04.25“). Which pretty much says it all, because “great buddies” is about the last phrase you’d use to describe the two men in 2007. Mortal enemies is more like it–certainly now that Apple has responded in kind to Anderson’s statement throwing him back under the bus he’d commandeered and attempted to run down Jobs in.

On Wednesday afternoon, Apple board members Bill Campbell, Millard Drexler, Al Gore Jr., Arthur D. Levinson, Eric Schmidt and Jerry York rose to Jobs’s defense, saying they stood by an internal investigation that had cleared him of any wrongdoing with regard to options backdating. “We are not going to enter into a public debate with Fred Anderson or his lawyer,” the board said in a terse statement. “Steve Jobs cooperated fully with Apple’s independent investigation and with the government’s investigation of stock option grants at Apple. The SEC investigated the matter thoroughly and its complaint speaks for itself, in terms of what it says, what it does not say, who it charges, and who it does not charge. We have complete confidence in the conclusions of Apple’s independent investigation, and in Steve’s integrity and his ability to lead Apple.”

The truth of the matter is everything is fine. We’ve shared it all with the SEC. It’s raised questions, but some of the journalism has been so off the mark. But I know the truth. It’s painful to read some of this stuff, but I know it’s kind of ridiculous and will pass.”

– Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the New York Times, Jan. 12, 2007

Apparently, Fred Anderson is the “Fredo” of the Apple options backdating family. This morning Anderson, who resigned as Apple’s CFO in October of 2006, issued he advised Apple CEO Steve Jobs of the accounting implications that might arise from the backdating of stock-options grants in January 2001. This, of course, runs contrary to the party line at Apple, which has held, vehemently, that Jobs wasn’t aware of the accounting implications of backdating. From Anderson’s statement:

Fred was told by Steve Jobs in late January 2001 that Mr. Jobs had the agreement of the Board of Directors for the Executive Team grant on Jan. 2, 2001. At the time Mr. Jobs provided Fred this assurance, Fred cautioned Mr. Jobs that the Executive Team grant would have to be priced based on the date of the actual Board agreement or there could be an accounting charge. He further advised Mr. Jobs that the Board would have to confirm its prior approval in a legally satisfactory method. He was told by Mr. Jobs that the Board had given its prior approval and the Board would verify it. Fred relied on these statements by Mr. Jobs and from them concluded the grant was being properly handled.”

You can almost hear the shrieks of outrage from 1 Infinite Loop, can’t you?

Anderson’s statement hit the wires just after the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against Nancy Heinen, former general counsel at Apple, alleging her actions led to “fraudulent” stock-option backdating at the company (see “We Used an AirPort Extreme to Extend Steve’s “Reality Distortion Field” to SEC Headquarters“). Meanwhile, Anderson himself has agreed to a settlement with the SEC that calls for him to pay $3.5 million in fines and penalties, but does not require him to admit liability.