The way Samsung has dealt with the Note7 fiasco is reminiscent of an incident that happened after the Palestine Liberation Organisation was forced to leave Beirut in the 1980s.
The organisation left the Lebanese capital humiliated, but at the very next annual meeting of all Palestinian factions, the late Yasser Arafat, who was the head of the PLO, tried to paint the evacuation from Beirut as some kind of great military victory.
This led one of the more down-to-earth Palestinian faction leaders, the late George Habash, to comment that if the Palestinians had any more "victories" of the Lebanese kind, they would end up holding their next annual meeting in Fiji.
Samsung and its supporters are trying to paint the company's response to the issue of exploding Galaxy Note7s as one that was handled judiciously. If that is so, one only needs a few more similar responses and the company will find itself in a situation similar to that which Theranos does now.
{loadposition sam08}Rather than issue a contrite apology early on in the piece and pull the product from market when it became evident that even replacement Note7s were catching fire, the company kept delaying its response until it felt the pressure from government authorities, notably in the US.
Prior to that, there was always the devious comment from the company that it could not confirm that replacements were also prone to combust until it "looked into the matter".
The length of time one can use a modern smartphone without requiring a fresh charge is a growing selling factor as people use the devices for more and more of their daily computing tasks. And thus Samsung's push to extend battery life is understandable.
What is not understandable is how a company that presumably has very highly paid public relations advisers failed to co-ordinate its efforts to handle the crisis with US authorities.
Found the perfect case for the Samsung Galaxy Note 7: pic.twitter.com/OnAY7rJB0P
— not Jony Ive (@JonyIveParody) September 3, 2016
As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, by US law, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has to be notified within 24 hours once a safety risk has been identified. Recalls are then done jointly by the company in question and the CPSC.
In the Note7 case, the CPSC did not issue a statement until 9 September, a week after Samsung's initial announcement.
There were also delays in providing replacement devices in the US where a million of the devices were sold in the short time it was on sale, a third of the total global sales.
Fifteen per cent of Samsung's global sales in the second quarter were in the US, and this market has been built up through a great deal of investment in advertising and and product placement during high-profile events like the Oscars. Exactly how much of the image Samsung has cultivated has been destroyed by the Note7 debacle will become evident over the next 12 months.
This is not the first time that Samsung has handled a situation like this. Back in 2013, the company had an issue with washing machines in Australia and was forced to recall something like 150,000 machines. Then, too, the company bungled its response.
One would think that a company of Samsung's size would learn from its mistakes. Alas, that does not seem to be the case.