Additional insiders have stepped forward to shed more light into Microsoft’s troubled acquisition of Danger, its beleaguered Pink Project, and what has become one of the most high profile Information Technology disasters in recent memory.
The sources point to longstanding management issues, a culture of “dogfooding” (to eradicate any vestiges of competitor’s technologies after an acquisition), and evidence that could suggest the failure was the result of a deliberate act of sabotage.
What starts out reading like high tech conspiracy theories becomes more real as you follow the details, follow the money, follow the office politics.
Even before the data center failure, T-Mobile and Microsoft were at odds over the future of the Sidekick platform and the Pink Project’s goal to break the exclusive agreement Danger had formed with T-Mobile as a long term partner…
Following Microsoft’s Danger data server crisis, things have moved from tense to catastrophic. T-Mobile owns the Sidekick brand, and the cloud services failure associated with its brand will likely decimate the million active Sidekick subscribers T-Mobile maintains, despite the fact that the mobile operator did nothing wrong.
“T-Mobile has an SLA (Service Level Agreement) with Danger/Microsoft, which is a standard legal document for these types of relationships, one that requires Danger/MS to reimburse T-Mobile with defined monetary penalties if the service goes down for longer than x minutes, etc…
“T-Mobile is now getting blamed for something which isn’t their fault at all, and a million plus customers are now seriously considering leaving for the iPhone or elsewhere. I’m also thinking that a class-action lawsuit on behalf of those users who lost all of their data (contacts, notes, emails, SMS’s, tasks, calendar entries) is now quite likely, and once again T-Mobile is going to be caught in the crossfire, even though the servers were all run by Danger/Microsoft and not T-Mobile.”
RTFA. Wander through each aspect of this project, mishandled and mismanaged, reflecting a corporate culture as bad or worse than anything outsiders have joked about – inside Microsoft.
T-Mobile – Deutsche Telekom – has deep enough pockets to take Microsoft over any legal hurdles they wish to for compensation for their loss of clients, loss of business and loss of reputation.
Cloud computing? No thank you…. M$ for crucial online services? Double no thank you!
Maybe. But for the average Sidekick user, they have no fraking clue that MS is involved in any way. They all think the Sidekick begins and ends with T-Mobile and that’s whom they blame.
RTFA: read that, farted aloud
I’ve got to believe that they have several paragraphs in their TOS that states they aren’t responsible for data they store.
You know to be fair, Sidekicks have always come with a warning: Danger
RTFA??? come on it says Danger/Microsoft!!! how much more of a warning does anyone need! :))
It’s not an article. It’s a blog post by a mac apologist, and it points to a biased apple site for its facts. I’m not saying that microsoft didn’t screw the pooch here, but you can’t treat this as news. It’s gossip.
If I were t-mobile I’d dump Macrocrap for failure to perform and getting in the way of my bottom line.
The article linked is a good read.
Though, I still don’t know why DU editors provide the links. No one visiting here actually reads the articles.
#7 tuckinfypo
It’s no rumour that T-mobile has suspended sidekick sales or that T-mobile clients lost data. Where’s the rumour? Sidekick was getting fed by M$/Danger. T-Mobile and M$/Danger have apologized. T-Mobile has put sidekicks on their website as – temporarily out of stock. These are all facts not rumours.
I don’t think I have ever seen anyone over the age of 17 with a sidekick. While this data loss is a blow to cloud computing in general, I doubt anyone has lost the final draft to their thesis on one of these things.
Little Brittany and LaQuisha will just have to look up the number of their ecstasy dealer and reprogram their speed dials when the service comes back up.
I have to blame T-Mobile for this one. They are ultimately responsible.
This perfectly illustrates the dangers of outsourcing. Even if you choose a well established vendor (Microsoft in this case), have SLA’s (they did), you can still get burned.
Lesson learned for business: An SLA is not enough. You must also audit and test your vendors. A good disaster recovery drill on T-Mobile’s part would have uncovered this problem before it happened.
The fact that T-Mobile blindly trusted their vendor was T-Mobile’s mistake. Microsoft did what any subcontractor/vendor does over time when not being closely watched. They boost their profits by taking shortcuts.
While it is true that MS f**ked up, and that will hurt their subcontracting business, the buck stops with T-Mobile. T-Mobile’s customers rightly don’t care who, or how, T-Mobile gets the job done.
#12 yanikinwaoz
I think you maybe mistaken on this one. The deal as far as i am aware after talking to a tmobile member of staff (maby not the most reliable sourse) is not an out sourceing one. T-mobile mearly sell the phones and run the plans whilst Danger/Microsoft run the well clever part the cloud and make the hardware/software at the end of the day tmobile aren’t as responcible as you make out. Its microsoft that cut the corner by outsourcing not tmobile. Its similar to the way tmobile run there blackberries in that all they do is the data/cell service and RIM make the hardware and set you up on their system (which i would imagine is thourghly backedup by know)
Are you sure? How is the plan paid for? Follow the money. If you are paying T-Mobile for the service, then THEY are responsible.
If you pay MS for the service, then you are correct.
So how hard would it be for Msft or T-Mobile to make some kind of software which would let you safely backup your Sidekick data (which is still on your Sidekick as long as you haven’t let it shut down) onto your PC.
So, when they’ve fixed the problem, you can still get your data.
John C. Must be loving this so much he is bathing in it!
And for the record I am against putting sensitive info on “the cloud”
Microsuck, inept on so many levels.
I’m not convinced of the sabotage angle. An equally likely scenario is that someone accidentally fried all the records in one or more of the tables or zapped an encryption key making the data effectively useless. Part of what makes me think this is that they stated that Danger employees had higher level of access to the data than normal developers do on projects. Never attribute to conspiracy that which can be attributed to incompetence.
Yes the money goes to tmobile and then to MS but tmobile don’t have a choice if they want to sell the phones.
Though to be honest the hole things stupid anyways the sidekick system makes little sense i had a 2 and unless you had a signal at the time you wanted to use it and the 5mins prior to that you where cracking but once it went all the data on the phone was gone till the signal came back.
People who make excuses for Microsoft ought to be ashamed. They are responsible for all of the biggest technical disasters: viruses that cripple your computer, commercial malware that steals money from your bank account, botnets that use up 25% or more of all Internet bandwidth, failing to ship a whole Windows client (2004) which cost PC makers and user billions, failing to rebound from that with Vista, and now the most massive end user data loss in world history. No other platforms have any of these problems. There is a new Mac OS or Linux every couple of months and they have no viruses or commercial malware. You cannot excuse the fact that Microsoft can’t compete.
I know Dvorak has been saying MS is dead in the water for years now, but I had no idea he was _this_ right! This level of disorganization and incompetence usually takes generations to happen.
Bill Gates built a very successful company, but it mirrors his personality — smart but paranoid, self-centered and with a little Asperger’s thrown in. You can trace the craziness all the way back to his famous 1976 “Open Letter to Hobbyists”.
What Gates failed to do was build a company that could stay strong without his guidance. Perhaps if he had read more Confucius instead of playing poker all the time…