You’re actually telling VW should ditch and replace all the cars, in the value of tens of thousands of EUR, instead of accepting the software upgrade cost, whereas Samsung should repair their bloody 50 Euro production cost device with a battery where all the replacement incl. logistics costs at least as much ?
Seriously ?
EuroFlyer wrote:
You’re actually telling us…
I am not telling anything but that for me it already doesn’t make sense to trash the whole Galaxy Note 7 production. Personally I would prefer buying a refurbished Galaxy 7 at a good price instead of seeing them destroyed. And I think I am not alone.
And regarding “loss of image” of a large corporation due to a faulty batch of products: Which company did never have that problem at least once in their history? These things are usually forgotten as quickly as they are brought up in the media.
That’s why I think there is a PCB issue (as well as a battery QA issue). All that would be left afterwards would be the LCD. These devices contain just a PCB with a load of chips, a battery, and an LCD. All are the same inside essentially (Samsung, Apple, etc).
Otherwise, the correct way to deal with this is to manufacture a batch of good ones, say a million of them, and swap them out directly to the end users, all costs (including overnight shipping) prepaid. I say end users because the distribution pipeline is interested only in making money and not in doing any “customer service dirty work”.
Then you end up getting a lot of credit / brand loyalty, because a customer who had a problem and had it promptly rectified will be more loyal to you than one who never had a problem in the first place. Applies to every other aspect of human relationships, too…
Especially in consumer IT where customer service ranges from really shi*tty to totally nonexistent, with marketing done at arm’s length (the arm being 1000nm long) via multiple layers of distribution where nobody gives a t0ss about anything, with the possible exception of a huge corporate IT user (say, a national health service) which bought 10k-100k of them and which gets, wait for it, a phone number!
Sorry to say that, but the various ideas regarding what Samsung should or should not have done, reveal a slightly unrealistic picture of the realities of a worldwide sales and distribution supply chain including independent dealerships.
They have tried to repair the Note once, at enormous logistical, managerial and technical effort and cost, and failed, when the repaired devices blew up again. How many times were they supposed to repeat that process ? We’re talking about millions of customers worldwide.
Samsung is an industrial conglomerate, involved in shipping, yards, medical equipment, and much more. Consumer electronics is one of their divisions, one of the largest international marketing and advertising agencies another one.
They don’t f*ck around. They execute. They tried to fix the problem, and failed. They don’t accept failing again. This is already a desaster, financially, imagewise, you name it. It must have cost a couple of managers their proverbial head already. So they ditch the whole smartphone model, tell everyone ok, we accept it, we f*cked up. Better luck next time.
They’re managers, not the local schoolboy investment club. If something like that happens again, they might ditch the whole smartphone production and focus on TVs and fridges. Who knows. Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
Please don’t use the f- word directly because it can cause EuroGA to be blocked from some users behind corporate firewalls.
Ooops, sorry !!!
What I read in various blobs about this is that Samsung did not have a choice. It wasn’t either the battery or the phone, it was the way the two of them connect which caused the problems. So neither could they just replace the battery nor could they modify all the phones. So the idea to trash them (unprecedented I might add) was certainly not taken lightly but in the face of a unsurmountable problem. It was faulty and dangerous.
And don’t forget: This is Asia. Asian face saving is very different from ours. Had this been Japan, I would not be surprised if some people not only figuratively lost their heads but literally. Failure is not an option there and you don’t usually walk away with your professional rep if it happens.
I notice that a lot of people now switch to Chinese brands like Xiaomi Redme or Cige which sell phones with quite impressive marketing data via platforms like Ali Express e.t.c. I saw some of them in Bulgaria, they work quite ok. However, I wonder if that is not trashing one maker which had one product go wrong with brands nobody knows and Chinese batteries don’t really have too good of a rep either. So what will happen if these things now flood the market and some of those blow up? When will the airlines pull the plug on Li-Ion?
I doubt China will ever do more than copy stuff. Obviously anybody with the basic production skills can make an android phone but if it was easy to make one of a high standard then Samsung and Apple would be out of business selling their very expensive phones.
Also the big differentiating feature is the camera, and the cheap chinese phones are several years behind on those. That’s OK for most people, and is OK for most of the world which cannot afford to pay the high prices, but in the end what shifts phones in the 1st World is the phone shops and most of them are owned by the cellular networks, and they want to shift expensive hardware, not cheap hardware.
I’ve been buying standard and custom made stuff from China for many years and the default position is that they make low quality stuff. For anything better they need external management, external QA imposition, etc. Very different from Korea and Japan who do all this by themselves.
Chinese batteries are crap. Most big-brand batteries on Ebay and Amazon are fakes. I’ve had too many whose capacity is a fraction of the real ones. Not just LIPO but crap lead-acid ones for UPSs too.
what_next wrote:
Maybe, but nobody really makes any checks. I am sure you can put three spare batteries for your laptop and digital camera each into your suitcase and it will just pass every security check
My suitcase got pulled out because I had loose AA batteries in it. They need to be in the device, or in the original packing. They were 2 spares carried inside my headset bag…
what_next wrote:
Replacing the batteries with safe ones would cost maybe 10$ per unit.
Que? Imagine the cost of the new battery + the cost of stocking thousands of repair shops worldwide with those new batteries + the time it would take to get that whole repair scheme in place + the labour cost. All this time your brand gets more and more damanged. We are talking about 112+ battery events with this model, every one of them gets big in the news.
That is assuming they have a proven safe battery to replace it with in the first place.
I’m not surprised they pulled the pin. Regardless it might finish their brand permanently.
