These dates fit the US fiscal quarterly yearly reports
Since you mentioned “annual exploding battery recall”, I did some brief checking to see if there is a pattern to all the dates?. Here's the battery recall dates:
October 14th, 2005
April 20th, 2006
October 30, 2008
15th May 2009
24th May 2010
31st May 2011
All these dates fit with releasing these bad news stories after news of HP's fiscal Quarter yearly points have passed. For example, The fiscal year (in US) for 2011 is as follows:
* 1st Quarter: October 1, 2010 - December 31, 2010
* 2nd Quarter: January 1, 2011 - March 31, 2011
* 3rd Quarter: April 1, 2011 - June 30, 2011
* 4th Quarter: July 1, 2011 - September 30, 2011
So 4 of the dates are right after the 3rd quarter is reached and 2 are after the 1st quarter has been reached. That way the bad news has the longest possible time to die away before the next financial quarter news is reported. (I guess the April news is more important, so they wait an extra few weeks after each April quarterly news, before then releasing these bad news stories).
As for the safety of these batteries whilst HP wait to get a financial quarter to pass before telling customers the batteries need to be recalled on safety grounds ... Well what is a few customers safety compared with keeping the HP company share price safe and less affected.
It shows these amoral self-interested Narcissistic corporate bastards at HP are more interested in putting their share price first over customer safety whilst they wait for a quarter. A battery fire, if it burned unattended, could cause a house fire and even worse, such a fire could even risk killing the customer and their family as well as obviously destroying their home, but hey, as long as the HP share price is safe and less affected, that's the main thing. :(
These dates show the Narcissistic people in HP are not thinking about customer safety first, they are thinking about themselves first, which is literally Narcissistic contempt for their customers. Flame icon for HP. Its also more than about time they sorted this mess out once and for all, before more harm is caused by them.