Thanks, Samsung

When news of Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phablets catching fire and even spontaneously exploding broke, I reacted in predictable fashion, racing to Twitter for an all-day mock-fest. But a week later, it’s no joke: No government has required Samsung to recall the incendiary devices, customers are still using them, and one gets the feeling that we’re on the cusp of a major disaster, with loss of life, perhaps even involving an airplane.

So on that note, I’ll just say this: Thank you, Samsung. Thank you for this wonderful and crystal clear reminder that you don’t have to be Microsoft to screw up at such a high level.

And, no. This isn’t a joke.

I’ve been writing about personal technology for over 20 years, and if you think back to the early 1990s—assuming, of course, you’re old enough to even remember the 1990s—you’ll understand how and why Microsoft became such a focus. This was the time of Microsoft’s ascendancy and Apple’s fall, the time when personal computers came of age and Windows became a true blockbuster. By the time the 1990s concluded, Windows and the PC defined personal computing. And Microsoft was a juggernaut, inescapable.

A decade of antitrust defeats later, a significantly less effective Microsoft found itself unable to respond to smaller and nimbler companies like Google, a resurgent Apple, and a growing cadre of often-ridiculous Silicon Valley dimwits. So today’s Microsoft is still big and successful—thanks, inertia—but it’s not as influential as it was in the past and it certainly doesn’t set any agendas. Today’s Microsoft is a follower, not a leader.

But I still focus on Microsoft, not so much out of inertia but because this firm, alone among its rivals, seems grounded in things that really matter, like productivity and getting actual work done. So it’s been frustrating to watch Microsoft lose its way, as it still does with its Apple envy, or its inability to simply collectively admit that consumers just don’t give a crap about it anymore. And maybe never did. Microsoft, after all, was inevitable, not desirable.

The defeats have been painful, and have been spelled out many times before, from Media Center to Zune to Windows phone and everything in-between. But this past year or so has been particularly tough, between Surfacegate, Upgradegate, Webcamgate, and all the other issues, big and small, that have dogged the software giant.

It’s tough because these were all problems of its own making.

It’s hard to defend a company that deceives its customers into upgrading to Windows 10, and then calmly explains to you that it had no choice.

It’s hard to defend Microsoft’s months of silence as $3000 Surface Book computers were hot-bagging it around the world.

And it’s hard to defend how a company as technically sound as Microsoft could be so inept as to quietly make a major platform change to Windows that caused webcams to stop working in Skype.

One thing I know from personal experience is that how one responds to crisis is perhaps the best measure of a person. When my son Mark succumbed to bacterial meningitis at the age of one and almost died—I literally held his lifeless body in my arms as doctors scurried around me, trying to figure out what had just happened—my wife took control. Her response to that crisis confirmed—no, strengthened—that she was special. And as I later told her father, she revealed herself at that time to be a superhero. She didn’t shrink from the disaster, she stood up to it.

Microsoft never does this. It hems and haws when things go wrong, assuming it’s not doing what it typically does, which is to not respond at all. When you do get the company to comment on a problem, the phrase “small number of users” comes flying out as if that excuses whatever ineptitude triggered the problem in the first place. It behaves badly, and then it hopes that the problem will pass. That’s how turtles respond to crisis. Not leaders.

Not always, of course, just usually. Microsoft’s stance against U.S. governmental data requests is both admirable and correct, for example, and Brad Smith is a personal hero. Microsoft’s current focus on customer feedback driving product design is real and not just “word shaped air” as it was in the terrible days of Windows 8. There are always exceptions. And they are quite welcome.

But the thing that really bothers me is that Microsoft doesn’t respond in an acceptable way to what I see as potential extinction moments. In the slightly reworked words of British comic Dylan Moran, Microsoft just can’t stop punching itself in the face.

So thanks for the wake-up call, Samsung. I don’t write about this complete waste of time of a company for a variety of reasons, and even if I did, I wouldn’t cover it as thoroughly as I do Microsoft. I just … care more about Microsoft—or, more appropriately, its products and services, and the people who use them—than I do about one of the world’s most blatant tech copiers. Microsoft matters. Samsung? That maker of washing machines? Not so much.

But watching them completely fumble the response to exploding Note 7 smartphones has been fascinating and, as time moves forward, chilling. It takes an incredible combination of ineptitude and the wrong kinds of skill to muff something this badly, and youve really put Microsoft in perspective for me. I just hope no one gets seriously hurt.