A Judge ruling in the case of Mark Papermaster, who wanted to work for Apple after his years with Big Blue, has told the world plus dog that the reason was because both outfits are competing chip makers.

Judge Kenneth Karas of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has made the ruling public after a delay while IBM and Apple had a chance to review the opinion to make sure it did not disclose any confidential information. The news that the two companies compete on the basis of chip making will be news to the industry, especially IBM and Apple. Apple has yet to produce an iPhone chip based on its own design, and IBM doesn't design smartphone chips.

Papermaster's lawyers are attempting to argue that the only overlapping product between Apple and IBM, e.g., servers, is one that wouldn't be part of his official duties at Apple.  They said that since he won't be running Apple's PA Semi chip design team, the non-compete clauses in the contract shouldn't apply.

Judge Karas said that since Apple's server business is such a small portion of its business and Papermaster will have nothing to do with that group, that experience isn't really at issue. However, IBM and Apple are competitors in the chip market because both companies produce or will soon produce chips that wind up in mobile phones, regardless of whether those chips are similar or even whether those chips were designed by company employees.

While Big Blue does not sell MP3 players or mobile phones that compete with the iPod or iPhone, it does sell the microprocessor technology for those products and competes for that business. To profit from the manufacture and sale of such products, IBM relies heavily on its "Power" architecture, and has employed Papermaster as its top expert in the development and application of that technology, Karas said.

It is easy to see why Karas thinks that Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO had been shooting his mouth off to the IT press, saying that the PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods, thus making his outfit an IBM chip competitor.

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