Between the Titans

By Riko Radojcic

This is a story of a regular immigrant engineer, encumbered with the fears and experiences from his old country, fending off large corporate entities pressuring him to sell a patent. And a story of employees of these large corporate entities graduating from the carrot to the stick approach. He feels that he cannot sell a patent for moral and sentimental reasons. They feel that they have to push the boundaries in order to achieve a win. The collision between the different personalities, with their conflicting intentions and worldviews, results in a series of unforeseen and unintended consequences that follow the interactions from California to Montenegro and back. A murder in Montenegro brings the story to a head ...

Theme

Standard management practice is to encourage team spirit and employee loyalty to the company. However, this often breeds the us-versus-them mentality, which could tempt some employees to go beyond the usual norms in order to ensure a victory for their corporate family. The temptation may be especially acute when the stakes are high: such as a corporate life or death situation. In such circumstances, some employees could be tempted to use unethical, immoral, or even illegal means to score a win for their team.

The high-profile legal war between Apple and Qualcomm that has dominated the tech-industry headlines between 2017 and 2019 serves as a backdrop for this fictional story. It was a situation with many billions of dollars at stake: an environment suitable for exploring the psychology of perfectly good people losing their moral compasses in order to achieve a corporate win. And it was also a case that emphasized the very important role that Intellectual Property plays in high-tech industry, and by extension, in modern life so dependent on devices like the ubiquitous smartphones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646541782

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Between the Titans

Riko Radojcic

Copyright © 2020 Riko Radojcic

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books, Inc.

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2020

ISBN 978-1-64654-177-5 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64654-178-2 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Declaration of War

Jovan The Beginning

Elizabeth The Beginning

Elizabeth The Slippery Slope

Jovan The Slippery Slope

Peter The Beginning

Peter The Slippery Slope

Jovan Getting Out of Dodge

Elizabeth The Dark Side

Jovan The Dark Side

Jovan The Return

Peter The Dark Side

Elizabeth The Redemption

Peter The Redemption

Jovan and Elizabeth The Closure

Prologue How and Why Things Got There

Epilogue Six Months Later

Postscript Apple and Qualcomm Settle The Year After

Storyboard Artwork

by

Adam Radojcic

Acknowledgments

This book, a fictional novel, is very different from the factual technology and/or a management books that the author has written in the past. It would not be without the support from friends and family, of course. They provided the most valuable feedback of all—they did not laugh and suggest that the author should give it up and go back to be an engineer. Special acknowledgment is due to Natasha Radojcic, Mariano Llosa, Ivana Milosevic and Dejan Radojcic, Taravat Khadivi, Vesna Niketic and Stefan Stanojevic, all volunteer readers of the various versions of the novel and sources of excellent suggestions. And of course, special thanks are due to Matt Nowak, who has patiently read every chapter, in its raw form, as it came along, and provided constant guidance and encouragement.

Thank you, one and all.

Preface and a Note to the Reader

This is a work of fiction. The entire plot, all the characters, the events, etc. are all imagined, and any relationship to reality, beyond those mentioned below, is purely coincidental and unintended.

The work does use some real events, such as the legal disputes between two real technology companies: Apple and Qualcomm. This and all the other historical events and/or technical descriptions used as a framework for the story are all well-documented in the public domain and are briefly outlined in the ‘Exhibits’ clearly delineated in text boxes that are scattered throughout the text and that cite the sources used. Beyond these facts of history and/or technology, the events described here are fictional.

The names of some public figures, such as of the CEO and COO of Apple or of the Chief Counsel of Qualcomm, are also used. To the best of author’s knowledge, the use of their names is as far as the relationship between this story and reality goes. The characters, their motives and actions, their interactions, and so on, described here are fictional and imagined and do not purport in any way or fashion to represent the named people. The objective is to use reality to further the storyline rather than to use the story to describe the reality.

This story does, however, aim to describe a series of events that could happen and to create characters whose motives and decisions are realistic. The intent is to construct a set of events and circumstances that mirror the reality of the high-tech industry, under which the decisions and actions taken by any of the characters is something that an average reader could reasonably relate to. Reading this story should not call for total suspension of disbelief.

And along the way, the story also aims to describe some of the wonders of modern high-tech, the humanity of the techie nerds, and the business realities of the industry. Most of the technical, legal, and business background used to set up the story is confined to the last Chapter (Ch 16) in the book. This chapter is presented as a prologue of the story and, as such, may be read first by readers who prefer to have that background prior to going through the story, or last for readers whose curiosity may have been piqued by the story itself. Or it may be skipped entirely by those interested just in the fictional story: for those readers who prefer to have their ‘spoonful of sugar’ without the ‘medicine.’

Note that the Exhibits highlighted in text boxes may also be skipped, i.e., they are not a part of the story. They are there only as a reference for curious readers who may want to know a bit more about the factual background referred to in the book. The story itself, of course, simplifies many of these technical, legal, and business realities of the industry in order to make it more readable and digestible. For example, in truth, it is unlikely that a tech company would get very excited about any one single patent, as described in the story. However, they do value Intellectual Property greatly, but tend to be more focused on blocks of patents, and they do routinely pay vast sums, of the order of billions, for tranches of thousands of patents.

The book also includes a set of ‘Storyboards’ scattered throughout the text, clearly identified in text boxes. The purpose of these is to highlight, summarize, and illustrate some key points in the story and to provide an impression of the physical aspects of the characters—what they may have looked like, etc. They are intended to emphasize selected aspects of the characters or the storyline in a visual way and as such may also be skipped. Like many of us skip through the recap section of our favorite TV serial. Or enjoyed by an interested reader.

Finally, the story is presented from the point of view of three main characters, and in order to interleave their experiences and show the interaction of their respective decisions, the flow of the events described is not purely sequential but is somewhat staggered. Similarly, some scenes are repeated to emphasize the different impressions that they took away from a given event. The dates highlighted in the heading of each chapter may help the reader follow the sequence of events and the interplay between actions and intentions of the main characters.

Declaration of War

Jovan: The Beginning

Elizabeth: The Beginning

Elizabeth: The Slippery Slope

Jovan: The Slippery Slope

Peter: The Beginning

Peter: The Slippery Slope

Jovan: Getting Out of Dodge

Elizabeth: The Dark Side

Jovan: The Dark Side

Jovan: The Return

Peter: The Dark Side

Elizabeth: The Redemption

Peter: The Redemption

Jovan and Elizabeth: The Closure

Prologue: How and Why Things Got There—The Year Before

Epilogue: Six Months Later

Postscript: Apple and Qualcomm Settle—The Year After

1

Declaration of War

Jovan Ivanovic

Friday, January 20,

The Bluffs, Delgany Avenue, Playa del Rey, California

Apple files $1 billion lawsuit against chip supplier Qualcomm read the headline on Reuter’s site that he was perusing on his tablet while doing his business in the bathroom.

It caught his eye because he, like most engineers living in San Diego area at some point in their careers, used to work at Qualcomm. But that was a while ago, and aside from thinking that another battle of the titans was brewing in the courts, to the benefit of the lawyers and no one else, he really did not think much about it and swiped on to the next headline. In fact, at that moment, he was more preoccupied by the idle musings pondering that newspapers seem to have been banished from the bathroom. He missed reading the print version of EE Times while sitting on the pot.

For one thing, he thought to himself, it was easier to read printed papers without your glasses. And for the other, you somehow paid more attention to each story. Probably due to the more restricted supply of things to read.

Which then reminded him of the times, long, long ago, when he was a kid in Yugoslavia and when the norm was to wipe with old newspapers. Toilet paper was rare and expensive. One of his chores was to precut the newspapers into right-sized pieces and to fill a boxy dispenser in the bathroom specially made for the purpose. He remembered often sitting on the pot and frantically searching through the stack, looking for the remainder of whatever story that he was reading at the time and hoping that the rest of it has not already been used.

Talk about restricted supply of things to read. Ha! On the other hand, this roll paper stuff really is so much softer, he mused, getting up and flushing.

He showered, shaved, dressed, and headed down to the garage, looking forward to that second cup of coffee that he took once he got to the office. And to the project that he was wrestling with at the time. As a principal engineer at RoCo, a medium-sized semiconductor company, he always had interesting projects to wrestle with. He got into his car grinning to himself, reveling in the fact that he actually enjoyed going to work. Having a job that he liked was something that came at the price of declining opportunities with more money or more prestigious titles. This was a luxury that he allowed himself since he had no dependents—following the divorce, and with Natasha, his daughter, all grown up and set up on her own.

Elizabeth McCard

Friday, January 20,

The 88, E San Fernando Street, San Jose, California

Apple sues Qualcomm for one billion dollars over royalties, announced the CNBC business news program that she was watching during her usual morning workout.

The news of course was not a surprise to her. She, along with the handpicked team from Apple legal departments, had been working on this for the last few months. Now that it was done and out there, she expected that things would settle down to a more relaxed pace for a while, for her that being sixty- to seventy-hour workweeks on average.

But still, she encouraged herself, better finish here, shower, and go to the office extra early. Early bird catches the worm.

She increased her pace, reminding herself of the target heart rate that she needed to hit, and tuned in back to the TV program just to listen to the local traffic and weather. She enjoyed the convenience of having a gym in her building. In fact, that was one of the criteria she used to select her condo. That and the commute time. The in-building gym, and a San Jose location north of the office, allowed her to get her exercise in early, commute against the traffic, and still be one of the first people at the office. Working out during the day, despite the company’s state-of-the-art gym that everyone raved about, was not attractive to her. The idea of sweating with her colleagues, or the familiarity that seems to go with group workout programs, was distasteful. Fortunately, she believed her genes were good—not many instances of obesity on the female side of her family, despite the old family money that presumably offered many temptations and opportunities for excesses. Still, she knew that she could not just count on genes and that she needed to work at it to maintain some semblance of a reasonable look. This was important for her not because of the appreciative looks from men but because she could not allow herself to project any sense of laxity of character, or weakness of will, that the curvier look that threatens so many women of her age communicated.

There, done! she panted, stepping off the track. She took a drink from her bottle and ran up the twelve flights of stairs to her unit, that being the last bit of her program.

Ah, the things a girl must do to win and keep a job, she thought wryly. But also with as much self-satisfaction that she could allow herself, short of being smug. That would be one of the cardinal sins according to the rules that have been drilled into her psyche, mostly by her Quaker grandfather who ruled the family like a proper patrician patriarch that he was. She was proud to be one of the lead attorneys at Apple and the most senior woman on legal staff, and to have been selected for an assignment worth billions of dollars to The Company. An accomplishment that was not achieved by just coasting along or resting on one’s laurels. But she must not be smug.

Peter Williams

Friday, January 20,

Verde Oro, Rancho Peñasquitos, California

In business news, Apple has filed a suit in San Diego District Court against Qualcomm for a whopping one billion dollars, claiming that Qualcomm has unfairly charged royalties for technologies they have nothing to do with, read the host of Morning Edition.

He was listening to his usual NPR program on the radio while mechanically spreading peanut butter on each of the four pieces of bread that he had arrayed on the counter. PB and J, standard fare for kids’ lunches.

Boy, it doesn’t take long to get into the media, does it? he thought to himself. But at that moment his mind was more focused on getting the kids off to school rather than on the news announcement.

Plenty of time to deal with that once I get to the office, he, a patent attorney at Qualcomm, allowed himself, making instead a mental note to remind Jane to buy more fruit. That was the last of the apples that he just stuffed in one of the lunch boxes.

C’mon, guys! Breakfast! he yelled up the stairs as he filled the bowls with their respective favorite cereal and put blueberries, milk, and juice on the counter.

While they inhaled their breakfasts, he finished getting dressed and collected his stuff—laptop and the office papers that were his reading last night. He then rattled through the list of items that he needed to remind the kids about: things that they were supposed to bring to school, after-school activities, and the like, and then herded them into the car. Standard morning routine.

He was actually very pleased how things worked out, with Jane going to her work early and doing the afternoon shift with the kids while he took care of the morning chores. Convenient since Qualcomm workday tended to start a bit late anyways, with many people rolling in well after 10:00 a.m. It also suited his natural body clock, giving him time to wake up and, on occasion, when they were not too preoccupied on their phones, to chat with the kids.

Another day in paradise, he reveled after dropping off the kids at school and driving to the office, and time to make another dollar.

It was a beautiful San Diego morning, clear and sunny, with the absence of the hazy marine layer revealing the details etched in the local hills. He liked living in San Diego and working at Qualcomm. The work of a patent attorney could be dry—reading patents was soul numbing. On the other hand, trying to understand the nerdy engineers and building suitable legal protection for their crazy ideas was fascinating. And Qualcomm had a pretty good work atmosphere going. Plenty of interactions with all sorts of interesting people, but usually at the cost of too many meetings eating up too much time. But he liked it. He fit in well with the multiracial and multicultural environment, and its rhythm fit in well with his homelife. He knew that he could make more money and progress faster working in a legal firm, but he was enjoying this position with a technology company. Promotions were slow, money was so-so, but it would set him up with a unique skill set that he knew he could cash in someday and somehow. But for the time being, he was enjoying it. Even after ten-odd years at Qualcomm. All things in their own time.

As his grandma Jamie used to say, over and over again, Have faith, try hard, follow the rules, and what goes around comes around. Interesting that she of all the people, the last fully black member of the family, in as much as any African American is fully black, had such faith in the social system and cosmic justice.

2

Jovan The Beginning

Thursday, November 17, the Previous Year,

Somewhere over the Atlantic

With dinner, in as much as airplane food can be called dinner, served and cleared, he was settling in with a glass of red wine, thinking that the one good thing about long flights was that they give you a lot of uninterrupted time to yourself. The only distractions were easily turned off with a press of a button. Cabin lights were dimmed, and most of the passengers were settling in trying to get some sleep. He paid extra for a good aisle seat and lucked out that the middle seat next to him was vacant, making flying coach class a bit more tolerable. This was not a business trip, so it was on his dime. He was not egoistical enough, or rich enough, to lash out the four thousand dollars—plus for a business-class seat. He could put up with it for the twelve-odd hours that the Lufthansa Frankfurt to Los Angeles flight took.

He was glad to be going back home, smiling to himself that he thought of California as ‘home.’ Belgrade, Serbia, was where he grew up, but by then it had changed. The people he knew have moved on, and the places he liked have mostly disappeared, so he stopped thinking of it as home years ago. It was full of memories, some good, some bad, but for him home was where the present was. And Belgrade was all about the past. For him. Even at the best of times he did not like going there, but especially so in November. It was cold and wet and dreary, making the traffic more congested and chaotic than usual. And the restaurants, especially the traditional greasy-spoon kind that he liked when visiting there, were unusually crowded and smelled of a mixture of cigarette smoke, unwashed bodies, and a kind of wet-dog smell emanating from the damp coats of the clientele.

Still, he thought to himself wryly, perhaps the weather was appropriate for the occasion. And it really is not so bad. The new parts built on the banks of the two rivers are nice and clean.

But for him these were somehow soulless. Too much like the malls, offices, hotels, and high-end condos that could be found in any city. The places that had a meaning, in the neighborhood he grew up in, seemed to have shrunk and become seedier, and many locations that were landmarks for him have been replaced by nondescript high-rise buildings. That was why he preferred, actually loved, reconnecting with the family during the summers in Kotor, in Montenegro, rather than Belgrade in Serbia. All his cousins had their summer cottages on the bay in Kotor, their common and shared inheritance, and congregated there during the summers. That place changed a bit less since the time when they were children and sent there to spend summer-school breaks with their grandparents. For him, that place was filled only with good, great, memories. And getting together there was by then a family tradition that they all carried on for half a century. So over the last ten to fifteen years, since he moved to California, Belgrade has for him been mostly a stopover place on the way to Kotor.

It was only a week ago that Nikola, his best friend from primary school, a godfather to his daughter, and the one person in Belgrade that he kept in touch with, called. A brief call, without the usual gossip about friends and families, or chats about the current events and their plans for the future, or trivial things, like the size of the ‘big one’ that Nikola, the avid fisherman, caught last weekend. Things that they usually talked about during their normal calls, maybe four or five times a year.

This time he just said, "Stari, the old man, has died. Funeral is on Monday."

The term stari is usually applied to fathers, but since both of their parents have passed a while back, Jovan knew instantly whom Nikola was talking about. His teacher, his mentor, his professional father figure, and his friend, Professor Borislav Dzodzo.

It was not a surprise. Dzodzo was ailing for a while, and his body was fading, although with no signs of him slowing down or of becoming more, well, reasonable. He kept writing, even when he had to set his computer to extra-large font size to compensate for his failing sight. Recently he had to zoom in so much that he could fit only a portion of a standard page row on a screen. And he kept opining and orating on his strongly held beliefs on everything, ranging from technical matters to comments on local politics.

True to his name to the very last, Jovan thought, remembering with a wistful smile the opening speech that the professor gave every year to a fresh crop of grads that he would be teaching, that expounded on the meaning of the name Dzodzo. It was apparently originally a term used to describe an animal digging its feet in and refusing to move, something like mulish, and portrayed the prof’s character very well. As always, the prof’s story was amusing, but also had a purpose: to warn this class that he would not cut them any slack and would expect only the best based on his own absolute and immovable standard. He was actually proud of the 60 percent fail rate for his class, stubbornly adhering to the old school Central European academic manners and traditions that have lapsed from the rest of the world since the end of WW2. Undoubtedly, he was talented, brilliant, and very original, a character, and an out-of-the-box kind of a person. But also very obstinate and obdurate. Especially when it came to things that he felt strongly about, which covered mathematics, engineering, professionalism, politics, language, history, religion, and just about anything else.

Of course, Jovan had to go. He told his boss at RoCo that he would be back in a week, issued explicit instructions to his junior engineers about what needed to be done, and dropped everything else. He bought the air tickets, checked in with Natasha, his all-grown-up-and-gone twenty-seven-year-old daughter, and flew that evening to Frankfurt and the following morning to Belgrade, Serbia.

He went immediately to see Milena, the professor’s widow and a sort of an honorary aunt for Dzodzo’s department at the university. They hugged and cried and laughed over coffee and cakes that she always baked. Like in the old days. She asked him to give a talk at the funeral, an honor that he really did not want but accepted with humility. He spent the days leading up to the funeral with a lump in his throat, preparing his eulogy and aimlessly wandering around the streets of the city, reminiscing about the inimitable Dzodzo.

As always, he stayed in Nikola’s spare room. Nikola and the family gave him space and were somehow all busily absent. But after the funeral, Nikola insisted that they spend an afternoon in his boathouse, shuttered in with a bottle of whiskey and a packet of cigarettes, talking, as they always did. And then finishing up with a fish stew dinner in a local diner. That was nice. And the next day he took Nikola and his clan—including wife, three daughters, two sons-in-law, and four grandkids—out to their favorite restaurant. This was supposed to be his way of thanking them, and a bit of tradition by then, established on his stopovers on the way to Kotor. But in fact, he suspected that they did it for him since they all really preferred home cooking and home comforts. That too was nice.

And after all that, sitting there, in that uncomfortable airplane seat and sipping his wine, he was on his way back home. He was glad that he went. It was not easy or fun, but he felt it was the least he could do to honor the memory of Professor Dzodzo. After all, Jovan’s life would have been entirely different were it not for the professor.

They first met during his undergrad studies. Jovan was just one of his many students, duly in awe of the larger-than-life professor, the subject of many urban legends that were traded among them. But even then Dzodzo seemed to have noticed him and took him under his wing. This of course meant that he was tougher on Jovan than on the rest of the students, pushing him extra hard and giving him an awful time during the end-of-semester oral exams. His pulse still quickened when he remembered those. Still, he aced it and got his EE degree in only five years—the average length of engineering studies in Yugoslavia at the time was more like seven or eight. He then went to work. He needed the money to set up a nest with Vesna, his high school sweetheart and then a newlywed wife. Things were good back then, especially when Natasha, their daughter, was born.

But then the Yugoslav wars started, followed by the hyperinflation, and everything went to hell.

His salary became worthless, and he worried about being called up by the army to go fight in the wars. So when Dzodzo offered him a Teaching Assistant position at the University, he took it. He thought that instead of working for free in the industry, he might as well work for free at the university and use the time to get an advanced degree. Until all the political shit blew over and the world returned to something like normal.

They were lucky. His stepmom was American and had access to hard currency, so they could buy food and things even at the worst of the times. When things were available. The item that for some reason stuck in his mind were disposable diapers. They were a rare luxury back then. He remembered how things worked. A friend would call, saying that such-and-such shop had a stock of diapers, and he would drop everything and race to buy them before they were sold out. It wasn’t a case that diapers were just too expensive, which they were, even after correcting for the extra zeros that were added to all prices on what felt like daily bases. It was that the store shelves were mostly bare. Such a common and depressing sight back then.

They were all billionaires but could not afford anything, sometimes because it was too expensive but mostly because it just was not