The real question, of course, is whether Google, Microsoft, and Apple will soon have to face a serious international competitor. It's true that Baidu's incremental image recognition changes might not be a game changer. But if there's any substance to these claims about speech recognition, Baidu might be on track to produce an actual competitive advantage in ways highly relevant to consumers.

Those engineers were allegedly working on a car battery for Apple. Perhaps Apple was concerned that details of their work for Apple would leak out. There's also the possibility, depending on how much Apple was paying for those engineers' contracted work, that A123 was able to hire some additional employees with the gains from the project, making their loss essentially a wash for the company. But if you can cash in on the success of the Apple Watch, why not have a go?