I mean one could argue that WD should have offered updated software that works with Mavericks, but the problem is this case who really is pro-active making sure pre-existing software is compatible with a new OS version.
Pretty much every major software vendor on the planet and a good proportion of smaller ones and hardware manufacturers.
Even if WD didn't
update their software, they could have at least taken the time to
test it and issue a warning before the general availability of Mavericks.
I realise it would have been a massive investment of time for them to see if there was a problem but it might have gone something like this.
1. Install Mavericks DP (60 minutes)
2. Install their software (2 minutes)
3. Plug in drive and access it (20 seconds)
4. Realise drive is nuked (2 seconds)
They then could have raised an incident and investigated further.
It's not unreasonable to expect the
largest hard drive manufacturer in the world to do this, especially when their crappy software is completely unnecessary in the first place and they are the ones who push it on people.
WD software worked fine pre-Mavericks, and obviously Apple changes something that breaks that software.
You really have no idea why their software broke - certainly not enough to be pointing fingers away from the obvious culprits (WD). They might have poorly implemented some protocol or standard, they might have been doing something hacky like exploiting some OS bug which was fixed in Mavericks, or the bug was present in the software from the start and Mavericks simply created the conditions necessary for the bug to be widespread rather than isolated.