[ComodoHacker]

>However, Intel does not appear too concerned that the incident will affect its bottom line - the company expects 2018 to be a record year in terms of revenue

There is an interesting paradox in our industry. If you pay enough attention (read: money) to security, you will be late to the market, your costs will be high and you lose profit. If you don't pay enough attention, you take the market, get your profits, but your product (be it hardware or software) and reputation will be screwed later. And worst of all: there's never enough attention to security.

So by simple logic, an optimal strategy is to forge your product quickly, take your profits within a [relatively] short period and vanish from the market. I guess we'll see this strategy executed from IoT vendors when market start to punish them for their bad sec.

For Intel, that "long period" just happened to be REALLY long.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I doubt Intel will see serious punishment in the market. As usual, there will be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth but when push comes to shove most people will prioritize nearly everything over security.

All markets work like this. People bitch about the quality of products, but still buy the cheap stuff.

[javajosh]

This will be true until something uses Meltdown in the wild to cause massive damage. When a digital superflu comes, businesses and individuals will be faced with a choice: continue to use Intel and be vulnerable to a flu that is literally wiping out businesses, exchanges, hospitals, etc or replace ALL of their hardware with AMD.

Interestingly, I think AMD has a lot of motive to create such a superflu, or at least encourage it's creation.

[bmer]

If AMD were proved to have been involved in the creation of such malware, to what extent could they be litigated against?

[javajosh]

Well, it would be highly illegal (and immoral) to create such a program, regardless of who did it.

[_jal]

Intel is TBTF. Like the banks but in via different mechanism, they appear to have reached consequence-immunity by becoming critical infrastructure.

[curun1r]

The same could've been said about Microsoft 10-15 years ago. Now, we could probably get by without them.

Intel may be too big for an abrupt failure, but they can absolutely fail in a decade-long slide into obscurity.

[Feniks]

Feature of the industry. It would take a new corp entering into the chip industry hundreds of billions and decades to get where Intel is today.

[doktrin]

You conclusion isn't in agreement with the section you quoted, so are you saying that Intel will be punished by the market in the mid to distant future (after 2018)?