Now that regulators have warned Silicon Valley that they are not allowed to have unofficial agreements not to poach staff, it seems that Google has headhunted someone from Apple.

Previously the last time Google tried this they had an angry Steve Jobs on the phone demanding that they cast the poor unfortunate former Apple person onto the street. Google has pulled off a coup by hiring an Apple senior director of product integrity for a secret project.

According to Venture Beat Google has never hired such a senior person away from Apple. Simon Prakash worked at Apple for more than eight years and was most recently the senior director of product integrity at Apple, according to his LinkedIn page. That means he was responsible for product quality across all of Apple’s products, from iPhones to Macs which must mean that he has seen standards at the outfit slip beyond his control. Now he’ll be working for Google on a secret project, presumably run by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who is in charge of a variety of secret research and development projects at Google. 

Still this could be seen as the beginning of  headhunting wars across the Silicon Valley IT industry.

More here.