Why Intel and OLPC Parted Ways 393
runamock writes "The New York Times has an article that sheds some light on why Intel left the OLPC board: 'A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country's commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization's laptops in favor of Intel PCs. Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world's poorest children. But the saleswoman's tactic was the final straw for Nicholas Negroponte.'"
Intel just sucks. (Score:4, Insightful)
Shame.
The NYT headline is a bit inflammatory... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now regardless of who's making the machines and what OS, CPU blah blah they have in them, it's good that this device class actually exists and it's great that more people around the world get a chance to use devices that we take forgranted. OLPC and the Classmate are both doing a good job, and I'd love to see other devices like the EEE PC tailored towards developing nations in the near future.
Re:The NYT headline is a bit inflammatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel wants to sell PC's. They don't care who gets them. For Intel all the feelgood stuff is just a means to an end.
OLPC doesn't care about selling PC's. ALL they care about is who gets them. For OLPC all the business stuff is just a means to an end.
Re:Intel just sucks - Agreed (Score:2, Insightful)
-- Aetherburner
"In the company of wind, dust achieves great heights. In the company of rain, it's mud."
Intel is all kinds of Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Expect to hear all the usual "Intel is a business" bullsh*t that always comes up.
What has to be remembered is that Google is a business, Red Hat is a business, News Corp is a business too, and yet none of them actively tried to sabotage the OLPC foundation they had contracted to be a part of. Somehow they can justify their participation to the stockholders, but Intel can't? Intel was acting competitively before they joined the OLPC foundation in July of last year. After that time they continued to do so, only now they had access to a lot more information about XO potential buyers. Their behavior was despicable and only further enforces my decision long ago to buy AMD processors exclusively.
Adding insult to injury, Intel holds a press conference call announcing the decision to split, without informing the OLPC board. Read through the stories from last Thursday. The olpc foundation had no response because they were shocked.
They recovered nicely in my view with this official response. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Intel#INTEL_RESIGNS_FROM_OLPC [laptop.org]
I hope Negroponte & company sues for breach of contract.
Re:Intel just sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that just some Godwin variant? [wikipedia.org]
AMD, Apple, IBM, Intel... these are just companies trying to outsmart the competition. You don't seriously think the Intel board sat down and said, "hey let's maliciously fuck-over the OLPC project"? That would take a special brand of evil, the kind that is only occurs naturally in Redmond.
Throw a spanner in the works (Score:2, Insightful)
Just like M$'s OOXML, which has only one purpose, of derailing ODF.
Fiduciary duty. (Score:1, Insightful)
Nah, they signed on to the board of directors of their own free will, and that comes with fiduciary duties.
If you can't execute your duties under an agreement, don't sign on to it. Period.
Re:No surprise here (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:No surprise here (Score:5, Insightful)
As a stockholder you are never asked about whether you want your corporation to behave well.
As a stockholder you are given an annual meeting, with buffet and speeches and an opposition which seldom raises questions like: why does this bank finances this oppressive regime? why does this corporation infiltrate and boycott this humanitarian program? To make me earn more? If I want to earn more no matter the ethics, I'd be a criminal. Especially in the criminal's paradise Italy has become.
Re:No surprise here (Score:4, Insightful)
At least Intel had the decency to void their contract, instead of just continuing not to honor it.
Intel did a stupid thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but lowering costs does improve the bottom line. How much of the Classmate's cost is software? Remember, Microsoft isn't a charity either. Intel has no reason to help Microsoft, they could make an Intel computer at a lower cost with 100% free software in it.
Besides the cost of software itself, no matter if it's $3 or $300, Linux runs on lower hardware specs than Microsoft products. The XO needs extra memory to run a version of MS-Windows, which means still more cost.
Re:The poorest (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep, that's the ones the OLPC project is aimed at. IIRC, part of the idea was to replace cost of educational material, so paying for the OLPC would basically be cheaper than buying books for the students (over a period of several years).
Re:The poorest (Score:4, Insightful)
I really hate it when people attack those who choose to cure the underlying disease instead of the immediate symptoms.
The goal here is to allow these groups of people to become self sufficient, so that they can eat the results of their own agricultural endeavors. Education is the _only_ way to raise a country out of poverty as handouts only prolong an existing fundamental flaw. Necroponte strikes at the root of poverty with tools and information, and it is this information that can overcome not only hunger, but greed and corruption as well. This is a long-term solution as these are the sorts of problems that may take a generation to fix, but if someone doesn't break the cycle all the aid in the world will only amount to a stopgap measure and a people totally dependent on aid for their survival. OLPC is a very noble means to a end.
Re:No surprise here (Score:4, Insightful)
So? Any company or wealthy person for that matter will lose x amount of his/her income to the government in taxes if that money/product is not given to charity. This gives everyone of means and every company a HUGE incentive to act charitable. Hell, lots of companies use this to get rid off products that are market failures and that would actually cost them money to dispose of properly! There's no excuse to not acting charitable towards non-profits in America. None.
Re:The NYT headline is a bit inflammatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the OLPC, whether spoken directly or not, is that old "give a man a fish and he eats for the day, teach a man to fish and he eats for the rest of his life." There are plenty of charities and organizations built around the notion of "feed the children." I'd like to say "those bases are covered" but perhaps not as well as people would like. (You'll find their local governments are often the ones getting in the way of the 'feed the children' successes... some for good reason, some not.)
But as long as these 3rd world nations do not grow intellectually, they will remain the starving, dependent children of world.
If OLPC was intending to make a profit, there were many decisions that could have been made along the way that would have reflected that end. They made decisions and continue to make decisions based on their mission -- a charitable one. It's okay you choose not to believe in it. It's often hard to believe in something that's not profit oriented these days.
Re:Intel just sucks. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No surprise here (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, State Attorneys General have forgotten this.
Giving food hurts more than helps (Score:3, Insightful)
When you dump a lot of food into a depressed region, the farmers in that region can't sell a damn thing. They are driven out of their livelihood, further depressing the region.
Giving food keeps people in poverty. If you want to help.... give education. Give a cow. Give seeds. Give time and effort.
Dumping food on the poor doesn't help anyone.
-T
Criticism of Intel (Score:3, Insightful)
Quite apart from being wrong (it's going to have some effect, for some slashdotters will be favouring AMD when all other things are near enough equal), your position is a little odd. Intel deserve criticism if they're doing wrong by the critic. Aren't all actors meant to be working in their own interests? Well, for some of us, our interests include the success of projects such as the OLPC. If you believe that "interest" necessarily means self-interest, you haven't studied your economics throughly. Supply and demand doesn't care about the cause of the motive, just its existance.
Re:Intel just sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your comment might have been intended as humor, but it's currently marked "insightful" so I'm responding to it on that basis (if not for your sake than for the sake of anyone who does think it's insightful).
Aside from the specific choice of language, you really think it's far fetched? If so, then let me spell it out for you: YES, Intel could well have had meetings where they explicitly planned to do things in breach of either the word or spirit of their arrangements with OLPC, aka "maliciously fucking over" their partner. Intel is a for-profit American corporation. Not even outright breaches of contract are off-limits for corporations; they'll do it every time they think it will make them more money than holding to a contract would.
It is far more plausible that Intel planned this all the way up the ladder than that this one salesperson just decided to be a maverick and try to subvert things without any approval from management.
I'd hate to think you're more comfortable hiding behind the posture that technically, nobody at any Intel meetings used the specific words "maliciously fuck-over".
Re:Intel just sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is that not all people, and not all companies, are willing to do anything (and everything), regardless of law and morality, in order crush their competition. What you are suggesting, really, is "why single out individuals who act badly". What this means is that acting badly should be the status que. No.
There are interesting parallels to this elsewhere (Score:5, Insightful)
In lesser-known areas, where state utilities commissions have allowed utilities providers (power and communications) to not develop a region, smaller, independent groups and coops have opted to fill in the need for their own profit and non-profit interests only to face opposition from the very utilities providers that refuse to service the areas themselves.
"The Electric Car" has been stopped and stalled many times by the opposition of big auto makers time and time again.
There are probably many other examples of established big business opposing small business in doing things that they themselves are unwilling or uninterested in doing... any come to mind? An under our "free market capitalist idealism" it's rather hard to imagine why big business would even care? It's because big business isn't interested in "free market capitalism." They want no competition of any kind and they want to charge as much money as they possibly can for their goods and services as possible.
These are really good examples of what big business is truly about. Every time you hear an argument about "free markets" being wielded by big business, I hope you consider what big business is truly all about.
(For example, the free market argument was given by Enron as the reason to remove or reduce government controls over the power industry and following that, every single state that allowed it suffered from ridiculously high power costs and even power shortages and irregularities in quality and delivery. The free market doesn't work EVERYWHERE and isn't the answer to EVERYTHING. And it certainly doesn't apply when there are human _needs_ at the consumer side of the counter. Utilities, food and medical care need heavy regulation to keep the nations of the world healthy and it's precisely the lack of strong enough regulation of the US medical industry is in the 'unaffordable' state it's in and before someone points to the US medical system as being the most advanced in the world, I hold it has nothing to do with the lack of regulation or the possibility of higher profits and everything to do with their exploitation of research done in public learning institutions... research not available to the public itself.)
Re:The NYT headline is a bit inflammatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Intel just sucks - Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience, there are tons of people in the business world like Mr. Negroponte. We don't hear about them for two reasons. First, they tend to be small business owners. Second, they tend not to do heinous things. The news goes for interesting stories, which excludes the small fry doing something nice for someone else.
Business is not based on good or evil but profit and loss. One should never expect business to do anything but maximize its profits. To control byuiness, one needs laws that make it profitable to do good and unprofitable to do evil. That means costs for business should include the externalities, such as production of greenhouse gases, now subsidized by government.
Re:Intel just sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel didn't sit down and say "let's screw over OLPC", they said "hey, we could lose money here". Companies will abuse monopolies, but Intel doesn't have a monopoly-that's the point; they did what a monopoly WOULD do. What M$ does isn't a special brand of evil, it's merely a particulary voracious approach toward getting and maintaining market share. See the similarities here? Before AMD became a force, Intel did exhibit some very M$ like behavior.
Intel missed an opportunity. If they got their chips into the OLPC, they could have turned it into a huge PR campaign and gained name recognition in vast areas of the world that have no idea who they are. Besides, OLPC is a nonprofit deliberately trying to bring low cost computing to areas of the world that have little or no access to the current market. Why didn't they have a Classmate program BEFORE OLPC existed?
Shame.
Re:So they're a normal corporation, eh? (Score:1, Insightful)
And Negroponte apparently believes, from everything I've read, that he and the OLPC deserve a monopoly on low cost laptops for por countries.
Also, from everything I've read, the *supposed* purpose of the OLPC project is to get as many laptops into the hands of children everywhere.
Intel appears to be doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.
Negroponte, however, appears to be trying to limit consumer choices and stifle competition.
Let me repeat that:
Neroponte appears to be trying to limit consumer choices and stifle competition.
Every other company that has tried to do that has earned my disdain, and from past reading, the disdain of a majority of Slashdotters, as noted by the Bill Gates 'Borg' graphic.
Negroponte seems to have become sidetracked from the original goal. In fact, I'd wager that if asked what percentage of kids in 3rd world contries have computer access now, as compared to a year ago, he wouldn't know.
Sorry for the flamebait folks, but my opinion of OLPC 'management' has sunk.
Re:No surprise here (Score:2, Insightful)
A lesson here... whenever you read or hear this, please realize that corporations hide behind this phrase whenever they do something unethical, stupid, or borderline illegal. Corporations also have a duty to their customers, employees, the product or service they sell, and to the government with regard to taxes. Shareholders are not, and cannot be, foremost on their minds.
Re:Why is everyone going after Intel? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope you sleep well on your pile of blood money.
Re:No surprise here (Score:3, Insightful)
IMO, Intel could have easily sold charitable OLPC involvement as a long term investment. Intel already has a commendable position in the PC market. If they want to continue to grow their revenues, one way to do that is to...
grow the size of the market.
and a _Great_ way to do that is to introduce children to computers from a very early age.
The OLPC isn't the only computer a child ever uses in their entire life. It's the first computer a child uses, and it shows them the big wide world out there.. and opens their mind to possibilities.
Insert the usual bit about "the first hit is free". _some_ chip maker ought to have been making a strategic investment to make sure that OLPC goes off without a hitch, so that in 10-20 years, there's huge new groups demanding computing power, and intel, amd, apple, or whomever, will be there with all these anxious new customers.
Actually, Intel and AMD should have done some market collusion to help OLPC happen so that neither would feel they were unfairly funding future market growth that the other would steal without maximal investment recoup. A larger market for processors helps both companies.
Re:So they're a normal corporation, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
He made them an offer, and now Intel piggybacks on his effort and tries to weasel a deal to have more expensive machine, meaning that fewer children will get access to an educational machine (but hey, Intel gets to make more millions in profit, which is what really matters, huh?).
And all you can do is rehash free market dogma to support the people who are undermining a non profit charity effort in order to divert the money involved to their own greedy pockets.
Re:So they're a normal corporation, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Negroponte can forbid Intel sell their boxes? No! Can Negroponte ask for them to actually deliver what they promised? Yes! Intel promised to streamline OLPC and Classmate PC, create OLPC XO-2 with Intel tech, not try to block OLPC sales for now, and lot of other things which they actually NOT delivered. Instead of that, sales person from Intel slammed OLPC behind the back of OLPC to OLPC customer, while being on board of OLPC!
I just wander who "capitalist dreamer" mod you up. Because you actually have NO clue what you are talking about. Check facts please before be so very elitist about corporations.
Re:Intel just sucks - Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
There are lot of companies, which actually kinda see huge connection between doing good and getting profit. If it wasn't so, there won't be PR, there won't be ads, there won't be customer psyhology courses, Bs for different marketing types, etc. It is all connected and it comes back.
Problem is different. It is not ethical versus material. It is long term versus short term. It pays back to be good in long term, for sure. But in short term, sometimes it doesn't.
And it all boils down to "stupid" human survival instinct - it wants all now, it wants very strong guarantee now. Not tomorrow, not even after one hour. If human just acts, not thinks, it will choose short term survival as it's primary goal.
p.s. "stupid" in brackets means - I don't know how to solve it, it's natural and if people live like that, who am I to judge.
Look at what Negroponte is objecting to! (Score:0, Insightful)
It's not that Intel was being dishonest or anything in its marketing. It's just that they're selling an inexpensive, yet complete, full-fledged laptop, and they're honestly and accurately pointing out to potential customers that it can do many things the OLPC can't do.
He doesn't care that the people shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars in education budgets might actually, rationally prefer the Classmate. He doesn't refute the claim that the Classmate has superior capabilities. His only concern seems to be that Classmate sales might cut into OLPC orders.
I can only assume that if a for-profit company came out with something that did everything the OLPC did, but better, and they sold it at a lower price, he would object to that too.
"It's a little bit like McDonald's competing with the World Food Program." - Can you imagine the World Food Program objecting to McDonald's offering to sell food to people who might otherwise accept food aid?
That is the difference between the World Food Program and the OLPC project. The World Food Program is about distributing free food to people who can't get other food. It isn't threatened by free-market food suppliers. If people can buy their own good food, the people at the World Food Program are happy about that, because then the WFP can distribute their free food to other needy people.
But at the OLPC project, they charge for their laptops. So they see private-sector suppliers as competition for funding.
There is something horribly wrong with a supposed charity project that is threatened by people satisfying their needs by other means. It's not a charity anymore, it's a competitive entity, and it has the potential to be as selfishly destructive as any for-profit corporation.
We've got to stop taking Negroponte seriously when he waves the, "But we're only doing it to help poor children! How can anyone object to that?!" flag. His organization is trying to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from the poorest countries in the world, and it hasn't even come close to proving that the money would be well-spent. Buying OLPC, buying into this experimental high-tech approach to education which has never succeeded anywhere ever, would be a hugely expensive risk for people who really can't afford to fail.
What is really the difference between "we're charging for our product, but we don't intend to make a profit" and "we're charging for our product, but we're failing to make a profit"? I would discourage you from looking at a non-profit, price-charging company as morally superior to a merely unprofitable for-profit company. The OLPC is a cash-hungry competitive entity.
Re:So they're a normal corporation, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, I suspect Negroponte believes that business partners shouldn't screw each other. If Intel is pitching their own designed/developed notebook, particularly trying to get countries to renege on commitments to OLPC, that would constitute "screwing".
This is not to say that there couldn't be OLPC competitors that use Intel chips, just not ones that an OLPC partner designs, markets, and sells. If Red Hat decided to make an OLPC-killer, he'd probably be pissed at them, too.
Only to the extent such choices/competition are coming direct from OLPC partners. I haven't seen where he's laid into Asus for their Eee PC, even though it would have to be at least considered as a possible OLPC replacement (greater power in exchange for being less rugged, shorter battery life, probably more expensive, etc.).
And you have determined this...how, exactly? Just because he's not interested in partners who cheat on him?
Good enough (for them)... (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly.
No one else can sell laptops to third-world countries except OLPC. Intel has a more expensive and more feature-full laptop, and OLPC is afraid third-world countries might be lured into buying something like, you know, the kids in the developed world have access to - Windows and Mac PCs. Id the OLPC is the best for them, the third-world countries will buy them, if not, they'll buy what is - not what Mr. Negroponte has decided they need/want/deserve.
Re:Which kids primary or secondary school (Score:4, Insightful)
To me, this stinks of some kind of commission for beating the XO project and not a standard commission on Classmate PC sales. After all, why would she give up bidding on a contract the Classmate PC was better suited for and instead, go after the XO deal? The devices are not the same if you look at the software and hardware spec's. She most likely was going after some big buck commission designed to end XO contracts. Hmmm, going after a competitors throat, killing the baby, cutting off their air supply? Remind you of somebody?
LoB
Re:Corporate inefficiency : left hand/right hand (Score:3, Insightful)
This is entirely possible, but it doesn't much matter. Intel acted in bad faith and put immediate profits and hurting AMD above children's welfare. Whether some people Intel felt one way and some felt another (as I'm sure they did), Intel as an organization took action and are responsible for that.
More likely when they realized they were going to be forcibly expelled from a PR friendly nonprofit for unethically trying to undermine it, they decided to pull out first and try to minimize the fallout. Whatever the politics internal to Intel, it would behoove all of us to raise as big of a stink about this as possible. The more it hurts, the more likely Intel is to put in place policies to stop it from happening in the future... which should be the goal of society as a whole IMHO.
Re:I wish it were humor. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, I'll bite. Which catastrophe? I have worked with people of many races. I have learned a few things that hold true no matter the race. Some are basically good hard working people some are not. Children have a lot in common with their parents, but are not restricted or guaranteed to be like their parents (though all are always influenced by their parents in subtle ways). Intelligent children tend to have intelligent parents, and over a few generations of good, solid educational and family values, any group I have been around has been able to catch up with the other groups around it.
Living in California, I dealt with Hispanics from Mexico, Venezuela, Spain and other Spanish countries. I met some who were very successful, some who were very smart, some who were very talented, some who were gifted leaders... I also met many Caucasians who were complete failures, total idiots, could blow soda out their nose, dealt drugs... Same with the blacks, asians etc. Race had very little to do with it. But, most of them were raised in this country in our public school systems. I did note that the asians and the Spaniards I knew tended to be very strict about doing well in school, and being diligent in life. I did notice that most of the white and black families I knew were much more into sports than academics or business pursuits. I did notice that the gangs were a rainbow of races and they all seemed to have the same relative intelligence, much less than others of their same races whose families were more educated at first, spent more time with their children and pushed more at an education, work and legal business. There were exceptions. Another problem is that IQ tests rarely takes into account street smarts, though that also is a form of intelligence that is very important in this world
So, color me clueless, but not only do I not see what you are describing from my own personal experiences with people from these other countries, but I saw absolutely nothing in the references you gave to give one ounce of weight to what you are claiming. And those are some very big claims.
I do agree that poverty and lower intelligence tend to go hand in hand (but the cycle can be broken and has been broken by individuals). I know of no evidence anywhere in the real scientific community that even hints at this much disparity in racial genetic characteristics. This is a hobby of mine. I spend more time reading up on the research in the genetics and neurology areas than everything else put together. I am aware of no credible research. Please point me in the right direction. This is something I have obviously missed, and I need to study it to get a better grasp of what is really happening. Seriously, please point me at these studies. I do want to read them.
InnerWeb
Re:Intel just sucks. (Score:1, Insightful)
I agree with you, it's a shame.
Re:truth be told (Score:4, Insightful)
If we were serious about helping Africans, we would be looking far past manufacturing crappy computers to sell to their governments. Of course the fact that we aren't is no great loss to Africans. We may not get it, but the Indians and Chinese do.
Astro-Turf (Score:2, Insightful)
Of limited use here really, if you were not ACs you might know why.
"fsck" Intel.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So they're a normal corporation, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is so sad that you posted this anonymously. But you actually understood that you posting rubbish, didn't you?
Re:"One clunky laptop per child" (Score:3, Insightful)
The Economist is a very good source of information about politics and economics, and yes, I have met people that write for it. On IT, frankly, it does tend to suck. I still read it because the CIO/CTO of a company is more likely to get their information from The Economist than somewhere useful.
The fact is that it seems that kids find these devices fairly intuitive. I would agree that perhaps teachers are missing out on how to integrate it with their curriculum, but sorry the government bureaucrat is the purse-holder but not the ultimate customer. Actually the OLPC is less about being a computer and more about propagating information. Some people are uncomfortable with that. The system it runs is criticised for not being Windows, but then what do they need Windows for? Are we training MSCEs or people who can write a few letters and do a budget and look up corn prices. Most of the competition at the low end isn't running Windows either. Lets forget about the software and look at the hardware. There are a lot of tough PCs around but they start around $2K. I've been to Africa. Yes, there are pristine classrooms but often they are like the towns they are in, sometimes dry and sometimes humid and sometimes without proper walls so the sunlight readable display is also useful.
Re:So they're a normal corporation, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those kids are not a market, this non-profit enterprise is not a business rival. If they want to sell their power-hungry laptop with their fancy CPUs, they can sell them to the kids when they grow up with computer skills and outgrow their XO, but paying a fee to get on the board of a charity (a tax-exempting fee, I'm sure) and then telling governments that being on the board has let them glean information that make them think the whole thing is going to implode (possibly with the ring of truth that knowingly sabotaging them brings) is indefensible, you monster.
Re:"One clunky laptop per child" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Intel just sucks. (Score:4, Insightful)
You've never been in a business meeting where an ethical issue has come up, have you?
If it makes money, a strategy enjoys a strong presumption of innocence. The question is not, "is this wrong?", or even "is this probably not wrong?", but "can this be argued in any way to be not wrong." One of the clinching arguments is "everybody does it." You can't not do it if your competitors are doing it, unless you can come up with a better strategy for making money.
Corporations are not people. They do not have a moral conscience. They do have an instinct for self preservation, and that means siezing advantage where they can get it. The only barrier to utterly amoral behavior is the consicences of the individuals within the corporation, but those people have conflicting responsiblities. They feel a duty of loyalty to their company which supports them and their coworkers. As such individuals are very weak moral firewalls against corporate transgressions.
Corporate partnerships are not like you starting a business with a childhood friend. You'd feel really bad if you exploited that relationship to send your friend into bankruptcy. But this is not even seen as wrong in business, provided that the partner can't take more out of your hide for breaking the contract than you can make breaking it. Do you really think that corporations take acting in bad faith differently where they can't be make financially responsible just as seriously as when they can? There are three kinds of corporate partnerships that have any significance at all: partnerships where the members are merging; partnerships where there is a strong vendor/user relationship; partnerships where the parties are pursuing a particular sale. I've seen many "strategic partnerships" over the years, and the instant it is advantageous the companies have knives stuck into their partners' backs.
Corporations, if they were actually people, would be evil. But they're not remotely like actual people, and they are neither evil, nor good. They have no conscience, nor do they need one. They are machines for generating profit, and respond only weakly to moral consideration that have not been monetized, and only through the consciences of individuals who are ethically conflicted.
It is naive to expect corporations to respond to human concepts like decency, honor, or integrity, except to the degree those concepts have been translated into costs.