Toshiba formally and finally exits laptop business
I worked for Toshiba America. The story is the CEO at the time told his underlings &quot;I cannot report such earnings to our shareholders&quot;. His executives then went ahead and cooked the books.<p>Beyond that, Toshiba was a company in crisis. They announced all sorts of forward looking partnerships via press releases and had powerpoints about them, but allocated ZERO budget to implement them.<p>They ordered their existing units (seemingly hundreds of business units) to stay the course on obsolete and non-competitive products that were not generating revenue any longer.<p>Their cloud and &quot;chip to cloud&quot; plans were Potemkin villages, devoid of tech or investment.<p>Their PC division was non-competitive with flash storage, even though Toshiba&#x27;s disk division INVENTED flash storage (and that was unpopular in that division--it went to market with much opposition, driven by ONE guy).<p>Toshiba basically played fortress Japan, where they made handshake deals with other moribund Keiretsu would just cross sell to each other.<p>They were being out innovated on all fronts, and were paralyzed to make the big changes, as the culture was one of never rocking the boat, and hanging on till retirement. The dream was to retire and perhaps be asked to consult back to the company.<p>The same thing was going on with the other firms there, like Sony et al. Disruption, the cloud, open source and innovation just destroyed a firm with an amazing historical legacy.