Apple Director Assigned to a "Secret Project" at Google (Rumor)

As the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Google and Apple for allegedly signing a “no poach” agreement, the latter has just lost a senior director to the former. Google will be assigning a top secret project to this person, according to VentureBeat.

Simon Prakash was most recently the senior director of product integrity at Apple, his LinkedIn page reveals. The man worked at Apple for more than eight years.

His most recent chores were to ensure product quality across all of Apple’s merchandise. VentureBeat appropriately notes that Apple has quite a reputation in this field, having received multiple J.D. Power awards.

Prakash wasn’t always Apple’s quality checker. Eight years ago, when Cupertino hired him, he was given the role of senior reliability manager.

And prior to that, he was director of engineering design validation at Cielo Communications. Before that, he was a reliability and FA manager at 3Com.

Now on Google’s turf, Prakash will be working on a secret project, the rumor goes.

This project is believed to be run by Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin, who is known to be in charge of several secret research and development projects.

Prakash begins work today.

As noted above, the timing for this is extremely interesting as the Department of Justice is investigating the two companies (and several others) for allegedly conspiring to suppress employee compensation by not poaching each other’s staffers.

Apple’s late CEO, Steve Jobs, also had a spat with Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, who allegedly stole ideas from the iOS operating system to implement them in the Android OS.

Schmidt had earlier renounced his seat on Apple’s board of directors because of the increasing competition between the two companies.

Suffice to say that the last thing Apple wants is to have talent moved from the Cupertino camp to the one in Mountain View.