Murdoch e-mails are nice in that they nicely highlight the multiple fronts nature of negotiating where you can often find compromise by shifting how you approach the problem.

The way Jobs closes it is quite unusual however because in this case NewsCorp were late movers. Apple had already reached terms with all their competitors and could put on the table a take it or leave it offer which Murdoch couldn’t refuse.

I was part of the team in charge on negotiating the termination of an on-going contract involving a potential settlement in the low teens millions of dollars between two huge industrial companies once. Obviously it’s nothing as big as a deal between Apple and TSMC but still not an insignificant sum.

I was surprised by how straightforward the whole thing went. Basically we had prepared our arguments: we knew the minimum payment we could justify, the maximum we thought the contract allowed them to ask, what we were aiming for and how much we estimated going to court would cost us and them. They had done the same. There were a couple of back and forth where one party made an offer, the other countered with another one explaining why what was asked didn’t apply and why it should rather be like so and so. At some point, we said that’s our last offer we won’t move anymore. They decided to agree and that was it.

What you witnessed proves bike shedding is real. I'm in much smaller league when it comes to budgets, but lets just say I had longer arguments about a budget for a filing cabinet than a half year software project.

> I was surprised by how straightforward the whole thing went

Executives value their own time over anything else, and as such - they don't find it valuable to haggle over small details in lieu of just getting the deal done.

And when everyone has done their homework, there's no real reason to delay the inevitable.

This has nothing to do with it. It isn't their time that is valuable, it is company time that is valuable.

For example, Apple has 150k+ employees.

A day wasted by the Company is 450 man-years

Perhaps he didn’t want an enemy who could give him bad PR.

An even better equivalent would be the Apple-Microsoft negotiations in 1997, around Microsoft Office, IE-as-default, non voting shares, etc. I think TechEmails published a bunch of these.

A darker example would be the emails between tech CEOs during the salary fixing scandal:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/04/apple-googl...

Just FYI, that post is 9 years old.