Re: Betting the farm
Sometimes forcing the supplier to the wall is part of the plan.
As a company who acts as tech lead for various small web design houses we end up getting called in to propose solutions and sometimes implement them.
A "no brainer" web site for a part of the NHS ended up in taking the web design house out of business. This lot then sent our *propiertary* technology to a body shop in india who (when the one year licence ran out) called us to complain we had "hacked" thier software.
After discussions (and legal threats), this lot then offered us what seemed like a nice deal to re-implement and support the original website. We forced them to include payment to the original designers and because they seemed to have no idea how to write a spec or contract used one of our large scale contracts and created one for them - in framemaker as a PDF.
We got signed copies of what looked like our original contract in the post with a request to return one signed copy by "end of day". It became obvious it was not a Frame doc and the SOP is to read anything very carefully before signing so we ignored the ASAP/today and found the "nasties" they had hidden in the contract. One clause would have meant that we would have been required to do any task they requested in a timescale they defined for one UKP.
Evidently this part of the NHS has never heard of a legally "unfair" contract.
There was a long delay from sending out our mutually agreed contract to the signing and returning. It seems this delay was to allow thier legal team time to rewrite the contract in an almost identical style to our original frame doc - and it takes *effort* to get word to look like a professional frame doc.
Eventually we stopped responding to thier emails and phone calls.