When F00F bug hit 20 years ago, Intel reacted the same way

Intel (like any other who wants to run a monopoly) has been trying to evade any responsibilities in wrong-doings either within (FOOF, the 2 new vulns) or without ("inappropriate" practices against competition a couple of decades ago).

This time they got caught with THEIR poop on OUR lunch-box.

They will deny wrong-doing, they will downplay it. I wonder if these vulns are exploitable, who had prior knowledge (e.g. NSA had 20 years of abuse for MS SME), and if they patch them, what new backdoor they now got (because conspiracy nuts apart, no one burns a card unless they got a better one and they just lost control of the previous one).

Their direct customers? Yes, but alternatives are thin on the ground. Their investors? No. This bland corporate blame dispersal is exactly the kind of language that investors are used to reading all the time, and that will placate professional investors enough to avoid a bloodbath. Techies who understand how bad this is don't have the PR skills or reputation to counter, because even most smart business/money people don't have the background or patience to understand the theoretical implications. Partial analogies and shrill responses don't have much effect as people are very used to techies getting passionate and upset about all kinds of things that they never feel the effects of. At the end of the day, short of widespread hacking with economic consequences, there won't be enough visible impact for investors to be bothered. If and when that happens Intel will deal with it, they really have no upside to do anything but spin the current situation in the most positive light.

The more interesting question is what kind of design changes they make in future designs. Because F00F was a trivial fix compared to this, and as far as I know there hasn't been a security revelation of this impact for CPU design in the modern era. You'd have to go back to a time when things were much simpler and easier to change anyway. If Intel engineering doesn't take this seriously and we see half-baked mitigations in new chips that's when I go long on the competition, because that indicates true incompetence whereas the current statements indicate nothing other than savvy PR.

Except it's pretty clear that this bug has been in Intel products for many years. I'd even debate whether this is a comparable situation, because that issue was discovered quickly.

This one has been present, lurking, and possibly exploited for quite a long time.

The bug has existed since speculative execution was introduced, 17 years ago. A 3-year gap between world-breaking bugs isn't that exceptional (I hope!).

Exactly, whenever there is any mention of an aviation incident, I am always in awe of how infrequent these are despite tens of millions of people flying every year more or less round the clock. What a massive human achievement.