[ScottBurson]

I'm not sure I agree, in the case of the latter story, that the other company was unethical. You contacted them, correct? In order to place them under an obligation of confidentiality, you needed to offer them some consideration in exchange for that obligation. It's not clear from what you relate here that you did that. I think you just flat screwed up, and your engineers' anger would have been more appropriately directed at you than at the other company.

Perhaps a fuller account would change the picture, but that's how it looks to me from what you've said here.

[tyler-codenvy]

Yes, good points. There is some missing context. We did contact them, but I failed to point out that the conversation developed over a number of pre-cursor setup calls. And that before there were substantive acquisition talks, there was discussion between the parties on the general areas where each of our businesses were claiming strategic importance along with tacit acknowledgment to generally vector away from those segments. In our case, we provided deeper insights around the specifics of how we intended to pursue our unique strategy after the initial discussion.

With any acquisition or potential partnership with a company that has the potential to compete, whether on the edges or directly, there are unique challenges to figuring out what information you should share and at what time.

But the take away for us was that we had a reasonable expectation that this particular vendor would not behave this way based upon our pre-cursor discussions.