"should have just kept their mouths shut to the public and let the companies involved just handle the problem and get the fixes out without alerting the goon squad" (anonymous... now sure how you quote properly lol)
"It was made public in conjunction with another vulnerability, Meltdown, on January 3, 2018, after the affected hardware vendors had already been made aware of the issue on June 1, 2017" - Spectre Wikpedia article
Apparently they were notified 6 months prior to public release apparently. Not sure if OS vendors were notified at same time? From what Linus Torvalds was saying, Intel's attempt at patching the hardware is all a load of crap, just a flag that can be disabled in software... From what I can tell, there's nothing that can "fix" the hardware on existing chips... i.e. there's no programmable ROM to fix it (could be wrong, haven't really researched that much...)