In his book, Only the Paranoid Survive, Intel chairman Andy Grove recalls how the 1994 ‘Pentium Flaw’ fiasco affected Intel employees.
A computational flaw had been found in the processor and, for several days, Intel had refused to provide replacement parts.
This generated extremely bad press.
“When they got home, our employees had to face their friends and their families, who gave them strange looks, sort of accusing, sort of wondering, sort of like:, “What are you all doing? I saw such and such on TV and they said your company is greedy and arrogant’,” wrote Grove.
Greedy and arrogant? Perish the thought. Thank goodness Intel has sorted out that problem.
What I liked about that event was that IBM had produced the data about the flaw, and Andy Grove was sort-of dismissing the IBM data. In the late 1960s, I had done some work on the material constants involved in avalanche breakdown in silicon junctions, and suggested some changes in the values in a short paper submitted to the IEEE IEDM publication, and Andy Grove essentially rejected my paper, saying that he saw nothing wrong with IBM's data.