Exploding Galaxies: How To Do a Recall Right

These are stirring times in the mobile phone market.  Samsung's long-awaited Galaxy Note 7, called by some a "phablet" because of its larger size and expanded capabilities that compare with some tablet devices, was launched in many markets only a few weeks ago.  Apple is shortly to launch the iPhone 7 in hopes of reviving its flagging presence in the mobile phone business.  And just last Friday (Sept. 2), Samsung announced that it was recalling all Galaxy Note 7s sold in many markets because of reports of exploding batteries.

The high-tech consumer-product business today is competitive, fast-paced, and exquisitely sensitive to customer attitudes.  So when a serious and potentially hazardous problem crops up in a consumer product, a company's response can make or break the product, and even the company itself. 

Samsung is facing a major challenge, in that the exploding batteries could hardly come at a worse time.  New product releases are what consumer-hardware firms like Samsung survive on, and today's gotta-have-the-latest-and-greatest consumers demand them as often as advancing research and development can supply them.  But every new design is fraught with potential risks:  new suppliers, new technologies, and unexplored pushes on the design envelope.  As power-hungry processors in consumer devices demand more energy, the batteries have to keep up.  And while lithium batteries (presumably the type in the Samsung Galaxy 7) are by now entitled to be called a mature technology, they have a stubborn habit of reverting to the spoiled-bratdom of spectacular fiery failures, which according to Samsung has happened in at least 35 cases, though apparently no one has been killed or injured as a result.

So far, Samsung appears to have handled this crisis in an exemplary way.  Here are three things they have done right:

1)  Samsung acted quickly.  The phone rollout was still taking place in many countries, and began only a few weeks ago in others, in late August.  So it's likely that no consumer on the planet has had one for more than a few weeks.  When the fires began, Samsung evidently has an efficient reporting system, perhaps using direct-to-consumer complaint lines and investigative teams, that got the bad news straight to the top of the firm fast.  And upper management didn't hem and haw and try to deny things at first.  They were the first to announce roughly how many known failures there were (around 35, out of several million sold so far), even before social media and other outlets had much of a chance to report the incidents independently.  And they announced their actions in response to the problem simultaneously with admitting there was a problem.

2) Samsung acted decisively.  They halted sales worldwide of the affected models.  (Apparently the ones sold in China use a different battery that has so far shown no problems, so that market is unaffected.)  And they promised that anyone who has bought a new Galaxy 7 with the problem battery will get a new one in exchange.  Period.  These are costly measures—they involve lost revenue from the hoped-for successful launch of the expensive phones (which retail in the US for about $700 each), and the hassle of exchanging suspect phones for new ones.  Samsung will probably be setting up a massive recycling operation in the coming weeks to replace bad batteries with good ones, or at least to recover usable parts from the returned phones.  At any rate, the recall is a headache of huge proportions.  But Samsung's management decided it had to be done.

3)  Samsung told the truth.  As far as we know, Samsung has been entirely transparent and forthcoming about the nature of the problem.  As I pointed out, their list of 35 battery failures is longer than any investigative reporter's list.  Their information-gathering processes allowed management to get all the relevant facts quickly and report them to the public along with their actions in response.  This is refreshing corporate behavior when compared to the way some firms have handled recall problems.  The worst recent example is that of Volkswagen, which knowingly tampered with emissions-control software in its diesel-engined cars to fool government inspectors while polluting much more than the regulations allowed, and then denied anything was wrong for months before independent investigators contradicted the company's claims. 

Samsung still faces a rocky road in the coming weeks.  Apple is soon to release its iPhone 7, and if Samsung can't supply the market for Galaxy 7s fast enough it may lose some of its leading market share to Apple.  But that is the nature of the consumer-market game.  It's like a horserace that never ends, with this horse nosing out that horse for a while, and new horses coming in and old ones falling by the wayside.

In the midst of such fierce competition, it's easy to lose track of underlying priorities and, if you'll pardon the expression, eternal truths.  Engineering tends to encourage compartmentalized thinking among some people.  Engineers are usually pretty organized types, and it's easy to think of one's life as sorted neatly into work, play, personal life, and a little dusty box in the corner labeled "morality." 

But engineering ethics doesn't work if it's treated as just one more specialized topic like Laplace transforms.  When you need to do a Laplace transform, you haul out the tables or the software and do it, and the rest of the time you don't have to think about them.  But ethics isn't like that.  In the best case, one's ethics is the outgrowth of one's character, of deeply-ingrained habits of thought and behavior that guide actions. 

In the case of a large corporation, the question of ethics is even more complicated.  A firm's culture is like an individual's character.  In a company with an ethical culture (not to be confused with the quasi-religion called Ethical Culture), certain acts are the kind of thing that will cause people to say, "We don't do that here."  I don't know much about Samsung, although they do have a facility in Austin and we have sent several graduates of our Texas State University engineering program to work there, apparently with good results.  But to judge by Samsung's actions in response to the exploding Galaxy 7 phones, the firm has done the right thing so far, and I hope it keeps up the good work when the next crisis comes along.

Sources:  I referred to articles on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 recall in the Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/samsung-recall-galaxy-note_us_57c9ee7ae4b078581f132451 and the Telegraph (UK) at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/09/02/samsung-note-7-recall-millions-of-phones-to-be-replaced-after-ba/, the latter of which carried Samsung's statement about the recall verbatim. 

Repurposing the Refrigerator

The development of consumer technology is a two-way street.  Manufacturers can't sell a product if nobody wants it, so successful consumer-product firms pay attention to what their customers are using their products for, and adapt new versions to those uses.  A good example of how this can work is on display at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas:  Samsung's Family Hub refrigerator.

As described by the Washington Post's Hayley Tsukayama, the Family Hub features an electronic version of the pictures and sticky notes that many of us cover the front of the refrigerator with.  It's a large touchscreen on the refrigerator door that can display a calendar, notes, photos, and I suppose anything else an Internet-enabled appliance can download.  It interfaces with a Samsung mobile-phone app, so you can easily transfer data from your phone to the front of the refrigerator.  The refrigerator also has cameras inside that let you see how much milk you have left when you're grocery shopping—no need to call home and ask somebody to look in the fridge.  Just call up your refrigerator app and take a look yourself.

How did a device whose original purpose was to preserve food become a communications center?  Will Samsung's innovation catch on?  And what difference does it make in the broader scheme of things? 

In 1996, historians of technology Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch showed how U. S. farmers took an early-twentieth-century technology intended for one purpose—the Model-T automobile—and repurposed it for a variety of other uses, ranging from plowing to running washing machines.  It's pretty safe to say that Henry Ford did not anticipate these alternative uses for his brainchild.  Kline and Pinch say this was a specific example of what is known to historians as the "social construction" of a new technology, in which users become active agents of change rather than just passively accepting what the manufacturer sells them and using it only in the way it was intended.

You could say that the refrigerator as family bulletin board is another socially constructed technology.  My grandmother had a refrigerator that must have dated back to the 1950s.  It had the old-fashioned (and dangerous) mechanical-locking door and a smooth white enameled finish.  I don't recall that she ever affixed notes or other documents to the door, but she died in 1992, just as the rubber-ceramic refrigerator-type magnets were becoming popular, both for the easily opened gasket seal around the door (which kept abandoned refrigerators from becoming deathtraps for small children), and for holding notes and photos to the front of the door.

Almost everyone in a household who is old enough to read is going to open the refrigerator on a regular basis.  So the refrigerator door is a logical place to put notes, photos, and other things that you want everyone to see.  For at least the last twenty or thirty years, the refrigerator-magnet calendar or business card has been a staple of promotional advertising products.  Most homes I have visited, especially if there are children involved, have had a refrigerator door festooned with a kind of graphic history and projection of the family's life and activities.  I suppose some sociologist somewhere has made a study of the kinds of things people put on their refrigerator doors, but the content isn't so important as the fact that it became a sort of custom, like the town crier in old New England.

Then came the stainless-steel refrigerator, first in high-end products, and later spreading to pretty much the entire line of products.  The stainless-steel style is so dominant now that I'm not sure you can find new refrigerators with a painted or enameled steel exterior anymore.  When our fifteen-year-old refrigerator died last year, the stainless-steel models were pretty much the only choice at the hardware store we went to.  If somebody had asked me, I could have told them that stainless steel is non-magnetic, but the full impact of this didn't happen till we'd stripped all the refrigerator magnets off the old unit and tried to put them on the new one.  They stick to the non-stainless sides, but not the front. 

So I welcome Samsung's attempt to bring back the repurposed refrigerator as family communications center, but I'm not sure whether a twenty-inch touchscreen is the right idea.  It all depends on the software.  Unless the Family Hub comes with its own keyboard, typing inputs is going to be a pain, as typing on a vertical surface is not that comfortable.  Of course if you have a Samsung phone, it won't be a problem.  (I don't know about the other kinds.)  A promotional video shows that you can write on the screen with your finger, but that rarely works well for more than a word or two.  And another question involves permanence.  Some of the photos we had on our old fridge were twenty years old and more.  Somehow I doubt that it's going to be easy to keep old images or other memorabilia that long on the Family Hub display.  And what about power failures?  If your emergency numbers are on the display and the display goes blank in an emergency, that's a problem. As for the camera feature, I can see potentials for hacking issues.  In addition to all your other passwords, you'll now need a password for your refrigerator.  But these are things that can be dealt with fairly easily.

The touchscreen-enabled refrigerator shows that Samsung is thinking about how people really use their products, not just how they're supposed to use them, and acting accordingly.  If it catches on, all the other appliance makers will have to come out with their own versions, which of course will not be compatible software-wise with Samsung's.  So if you get a new refrigerator, does that mean you'll have to get a new phone to match?  I hope not.  The Family Hub may be one of those silly things that disappears without a trace.  Or it may be the first sign of something that will become as universal as mobile phones themselves.  Time and the consumer will decide.

Sources:  Hayley Tsukayama's report on the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show was carried in the Washington Post online edition on Jan. 8, 2016 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/08/ces-is-known-for-having-some-crazy-gadgets-this-year-is-no-exception/.  The article "Users as Agents of Technological Change:  The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States," by Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch appeared in the Society for the History of Technology journal  Technology & Culture, vol. 37, no. 4 (Oct. 1996), pp. 763-795.