The Takata airbag recall as well as the Note 7 are two of the most high profile recalls I can think of in recent history. Can anyone think of any other recalls that affected so many consumers and received so much press coverage?
1. The UK isn't used to the idea of bottled water from the tap, versus a spring, which caused some mockery which may have been survivable except...
2. After testing by food standards agencies the water was found to have elevated levels of bromate causing all stock to be recalled.
The upshot was the brand was completely tainted in the UK and was never relaunched by Coke there.
http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/drinks/schweppes-water/schweppes-...
They take Lake District spring water, distil it (removing any point of using spring water, and using a ton of pointless extra energy), then inject some snake oil, sorry electrolytes.
Samsung will get over it. So will consumers. The brand is a juggernaut.
But they didn't solve the problem, gave people replacement devices they said were safe and were wrong about that again. I'm not suggesting malice here. I think that it is perfectly plausible (even likely) that they thought they had found and fixed the problem and were just wrong. But that doesn't really matter. They may not be malicious, but they are demonstrably incompetent when it comes to safety. That's probably worse.
Even with the news that the Note 7 is effectively dead....I dont think this will be more than a blip on Samsung's history and some uncomfortable quarterly financial reports. I am certain they are not 'finished' in the sense that consumers will stop purchasing Samsung phones. Time will tell.
AMD is nice and all, I do have a few computers with them, but they hardly matter worldwide in terms of marketshare.
Samsung is another matter, there are plenty of smartphone brands to choose from and compatibility isn't a requirement.
I remember when this FDIV bug happened in ~94-95, at the time there were plenty of x86 manufacturers. AMD presented probably the biggest competitive threat to Intel. IBM, Cyrix, VIA were all cheap-and-cheerful CPUs that found their way into plenty of office desktops via OEMs.
AMD were a serious problem for Intel around 1998-2001 with their K7 architecture. The Athlons and Durons were incredible bang for buck and owned the desktop high-end mindshare. Anyway that's a discussion for another time :)
Back to phones - Samsung dominate the Android phone space. Time will tell if people move away but history suggests they'll be perfectly fine. People still drive Toyota despite product defects killing people.
I guarantee in 12 months people wont give a shit if the latest Samsung phone is a top performer. Phones are a status symbol. Safety rarely trumps fashion in the consumer retail world.
Very coincidental.
What really killed the system was that there were side bets worth magnitudes more than the MBS securities themselves that the market would keep going up because no-one really looked into the crap going under those bonds and how risky they really were.
And I do think there's room for viewing the extraordinary actions the Fed took as a recall, e.g. MBS purchases during QE 1, 2, 3....