If the damage is actually as bad as it sounds, Samsung is probably talking with their lawyers and is being instructed to maintain radio silence so as to better prepare for the class-action lawsuit.
Remember when Crowdstrike crashed half the computers on the planet for a full day? Well, if you do, you're one of the few, because people are still using Crowdstrike, and the stock is still doing well overall.
That's logical reasoning, not corporation reasoning.
Nobody involved in the decision making cares about the customers. They only care about the potential hit to the bottom line, and if that's perceived as callous silence, they don't care. Unless, of course, they decide that appearing to care and being responsive results in less of a hit.
Silences like these are strategic and dependably predictable - engaging with customers on average costs more than remaining silent for whatever metric they've applied to the fix. If it takes longer than they thought, they might feel compelled to speak out, or they could just depend on the issue to fade into the 24 hour news cycle. Engaging with a customer runs the risk of them interacting with some threshold of people that will keep the negative story in the headlines for longer than it might otherwise be.
> They only care about the potential hit to the bottom line, and if that's perceived as callous silence, they don't care.
I don't think that is true. I think people care a lot... just not about the consumers. People care about themselves - they also don't want to be fired. So the decision is punted up the chain, all the way to executives. And executives want to mitigate the damage to themselves first, their orgs second, maybe consumers third.
Law is not logical and rarely makes sense. I'm not suggesting at all that they are doing the morally correct thing, but there are a bunch of ways that you can legally admit liability without meaning to.
For example, little life pro-tip, never directly pay for a loan that you aren't liable for. Proxy it through the debtor, or not at all and get a lawyer if the debtor is deceased.
Depends, radio silence will cost you money compared to just fixing the problem if that's feasible but it will save you money compared to accidentally admitting to liability in a rushed press release.
Sounds like we need to increase liability for witholding information from customers when that causes damages to make the result of that equation align with consumer interests.
As soon as there is any hint of a lawsuit, it immediately switches to CYA mode: "don't apologize, don't admit guilt, keep PR on a tight leash with a legal team watching every word and punctuation".
A few years ago, some Samsung TVs such as TU8000, had basically a factory defect. Randomly, after a few months, a "line" appears on the TV.
They knew they should have announced a recall, but they didn't. What they did was... They simply replace the TV panel, even outside the warranty, just to avoid lawsuits (After the person first try to contact them).
Yes, outside the warranty.
But one with one detail: They replace it with the same defective panel.
Unfortunately, I was the lucky one who ended up buying this TV, and I've already replaced the panel about three times in less than five years.
Even the Samsung repair technicians that came to my house to fix the TV already told "The model just have this issue, nothing we can do about it. If it happens again, report it again to fix"
Unfortunately in the US it was discovered that you could do this and now everybody does it. They're called "arbitration clauses" even though their true purpose is to stop you from being able to sue or be part of a class action.
Forced arbitration is just yet another way to limit the consequences of actively hostile business practices. I tend to think of it as the next step after modern customer service: Where modern CS is all about tiring the customer out so they don't have the energy left to raise a proper dispute, arbitration is all about preventing the inevitable occasional actually-motivated customer from receiving the publicity or having the power of a proper lawsuit. It's all about minimizing the voice of the customer, minimizing potential inconvenience for the company, and especially minimizing the company's potential liability. They want to avoid class actions for the exact same reason why Amazon wants to avoid unions, and they want to avoid lawsuits exactly because of their benefit to customers - a potential for lawsuits would wrench away some of the control that companies so enjoy using for their abuse of those customers.
While I understand that not all companies are like this... most are, especially the big ones.
So when I say the "true purpose" is to stop you from being able to sue, I do not mean that it's somehow some closely-held secret that arbitration is an alternative to suing. It's just that the widely perpetuated façade of "oh you just agree to the more convenient arbitration" is a vast oversimplification and there are much deeper and far more malicious intents behind those clauses. It is not at all the win-win that companies would have you believe; I've even unironically seen at least one company say, essentially, "arbitration is much better, and filing a lawsuit is so inconvenient that you wouldn't want to do it anyway". Yeah. It's soo inconvenient for me to cause you so much trouble. For me. Inconvenient for me. It sure is. I'm definitely the one that wouldn't want it to happen. I definitely don't like when companies pay for intentional wrongs directed at me. Definitely not.
I've been wronged by companies a lot through the years and I have exactly zero patience for exactly these kinds of terrible, anti-consumer business practices. Access to arbitration as an option is great; forced arbitration however is a trap designed to protect the company at the expense of the consumer. In other words, forced arbitration has never actually been about arbitration at all, but rather exclusively getting out of lawsuits. That is what "true purpose" means. "Arbitration" is just their "get out of lawsuits free" card; they would use any other card that would have the same effect, because it is that effect that they're after.
