SALİM KADIBEŞEGİL

(*) Written for the July-August 2024 issue 54 of BrandMap magazine.)

Friday, July 19, 2024,  went down in history as a document that he had a special seat among the “Black Fridays”. With a software update under Microsoft’s management, life on a global scale has almost stopped! The $3.2 trillion company may have lost 3.7% of its market value at the end of the day, but its loss of its place among the world’s most respected brands is much bigger than that. The decline in the shares of CrowdStrike, the company that caused this scandal, is 13%.

This event, which came to the fore while talking about building our work and life in the days of artificial intelligence, would be managed on its own if it only concerns Microsoft. However, in a section of daily life ranging from the plane ticket in your hand, to the queue for withdrawals at the ATM, to cases that can end up in health care, the problem suddenly comes out of Microsoft’s reputation and turns into the reputation problem of those who sit in the boss’s chair of all business models whose job is to manage life with technology.

Let’s put aside Elon Musk’s characterization of the incident as “the biggest IT fiasco ever” for now. He is trying to learn lessons that may be needed for him in the future.

But it is a fact that all crisis management plans have failed because of this event! I don’t even want to think about how risk managers spend the day. Because this incident has shown that the main problem is our inadequacy in terms of how to account for what technology brings and what it takes. This is not a crisis, but “chaos”. There is a basic motto in the understanding of communication management, which I have always emphasized and  evaluated in the past as “Coronachaos”[1]: “crises can be managed, but chaos cannot be managed!” As with Covid 19, the world  was caught off guard by this sainthood of technology. Now, to a greater or lesser extent, every affected brand  is pondering the “blue screen” strategy. Because this problem, which is not caused by them, gnaws at their reputation every hour!

We know that technology will heal itself in some form.  We learned this by climbing the steps of the information society with the keyboard at our fingertips. However, with July 19, 2024, another curtain has opened:  what kind of assurance will Microsoft, the boss of a software that the whole world has to use “hand prisoner”, give that such a thing will not happen again? How will he rebuild his lost trust? What kind of “price” will he be willing to pay for the restoration of his reputation while making very ambitious investments in artificial intelligence technologies  ?

Şu anda dünyanın en büyük şirketlerinden Boeing skandallar serisine eklediği bir He is grappling with his other “ingenuity”. While he wants to prove his technological competencies, he cannot bring back the astronauts he sent to the International Space Station! It is still unclear at the time of writing when they will be able to return! When you turn the pages of Boeing in the history of crises of companies,  you can see that the company has been managed on a “blue screen” for many years.

Every crisis reflects on the corporate culture of the company that is the addressee of that crisis. Microsoft’s policies in the Netscape scramble, which paved the way for its monopoly of web browsers, contained clues to how it wanted to manage business on a global scale. That is, the screen  was starting to become “bluish”. But “life goes on”. The dust cloud in this chaos will settle down, and life will “resume from where it left off”. Microsoft will again be the most valuable company in the world, and it will take its security measures by taking the necessary lessons. But one day, when technology gets bored or cranky, a hot war will remind humanity of what a “blue screen trap” it has fallen into.