This just occurred to me: Lenovo is a Chinese company and this broke right at the start of the Chinese Lunar New Year (a Christmas-sized or arguably bigger holiday in Chinese culture). Obviously I can't prove this is having an impact, but it wouldn't shock me to find out that this contributed to the amazing PR tone-deafness and incompetence of their response so far. Of course, that wouldn't excuse any of the terrible decisions made earlier, but it would be an interesting wrinkle from the perspective of assessing their crisis-management.