Western Digital wins California court skirmish against Toshiba A California court has told Toshiba not to transfer its flash memory joint venture interests to anyone else without advance notice to WDC subsidiary SanDisk, so that the issue is preserved for arbitration. Toshiba is trying to sell its NAND memory business, which owns three individual joint venture (JV) interests with SanDisk …
I don't see WDC having done anything wrong, but just trying to keep to the JV agreement.
Its kinda like marraige with jointly owned house and one deciding to sell their share to a third party and trying to kick the other party our of the house as well (and refusing them a chance to buy out the other half).
(I know, not the best analogy)
Your analogy falls down in a few places:
1) Toshiba aren't trying to kick WDC out of the JV. They'd just have new 'house-mates'
2) Toshiba would probably have been fairly happy to sell to WDC if WDC could afford to pay a fair price but as has been reported on a few occasions now, they're too leveraged to make a decent bid
3) Not related to WDC/Toshiba but I have a friend whose dad is forcing their mother to sell the house so apparently that's perfectly legal.
Don't sign contracts based on the people you're dealing with at the moment. We see this happen all the time - not at this scale, but the same concept. Two parties enter into an "exploitable" agreement based on the genuine goodwill and best intentions of everyone involved.... and then something changes. Could be management /ownership, or it could be a change in the business environment. In this case, it's both. At that point, all of the goodwill and best intentions become secondary to survival or some over-educated executive's idea to squeeze every last drop of possible revenue from their customer base or whatever.
We're going through a procurement process right now and have rejected a few potential vendors based on this principle. On the other side, will people please quite presenting stupid contracts? Most of the stuff we object to doesn't appear to be malicious - just sloppy legal work. Good attorneys aren't cheap, but they're less expensive in the long run than a bad contract. On the plus side, we figure if the legal work that Officially Defines our relationship with a vendor is crap. then they're probably cutting corners elsewhere as well. It's a good thing to look out for during negotiations, and one of the reasons we like to see contracts at the beginning of the due diligence process rather than at the end.
"Don't sign contracts based on the people you're dealing with at the moment."
Problem is, we're not prescient. I don't think anyone could figure Toshiba as a whole would get into so much financial trouble so quickly. It's sorta like finding out a millionaire had turned penniless overnight over something that seemed like a great idea at the time. Or a close teetotaler friend having just one night of drinking and suddenly ending up with a legal mess worse than the Gordian Knot, including a gruesome DUI-based Vehicular Homicide charge.
IOW, some things you just CAN'T anticipate or you'd go insane.
@ecarlseen "Don't sign contracts based on the people you're dealing with at the moment."
Quite right. I would suggest a modified form is also true: "Don't accept shitty legislation from the Gubbermint just because you like the current lot that are in, or they've offered huggy snuggly reasons for implementing laws that go further and wider than they need to achieve what they have proposed."
An example would be laws permitting blanket surveillance; an oft discussed topic here at El Reg. Just because the current lot claim they want to go after Terrorists and the like now, doesn't mean they won't be used in other self serving ways in the future by a different lot.
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