

Ask HN: Should companies blame a third-party for a defect/problem? - yuhong

WakeMate once blamed China when the power adapter shipped with it damaged the WakeMate. Later another Hacker News thread talked about whether Reddit should blame Amazon for the outages. What do you think?
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regularfry
There's another situation I've seen happen where there's clearly a problem
with a third party's component, and customers are looking to you to fix it,
but the third party is genuinely not to blame for the problem and it would be
unfair to expose them to the negative PR which would result. In my case this
was with a component on a car which caused what looked to the customer to be a
worrying defect (so the negative PR would have been significant), but was in
fact completely harmless, and it only ever manifested in a fairly narrow range
of meteorological conditions.

All you can really do then is hunker down and work together to fix the
problem. There's nothing to be gained by alienating the only people who can
fix something which is, at the end of the day, making _you_ look bad.

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morrow
I think an important corollary is whether or not disclosing the source of a
problem outside of your organization automatically assigns blame to them,
intended or not.

In my opinion, however, the most important trait of a press statement
regarding defects/problems is who outright says "I (we) accept full
responsibility" or "I (we) place full responsibility on X". If that isn't ever
said in some way, shape, or form, and it's just implied, I think that shows
less character than at least making a call one way or the other, and accepting
the consequences.

