Sidekick outage a result of inside sabotage & “Dogfooding”? [Update]
**Update: Microsoft’s pet unicorn works wonders as they announce that “most, if not all” customer data lost during the great Sidekick slaying of ’09 is restored or soon to be. Whew! So, conspiracy or simply mechanical failure mixed with a pinch of human error?
**Update 2: A word from a TechCrunch via Microsoft:
We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data.
So there you have it. No crazy sabotage plans (though they were highly believable) or world ending tales. Simple hardware failure. Remember however that this hardware failure was one of the worst to date for a major company such as Microsoft and will no doubt stay in the general publics’ minds for months possibly years to come. Move along folks…the excitement here is over.
Now before you go and discount the ‘ol “inside job” claim, stick with me for a minutes. There’s some real meat to this story. First, we’ll start off with be simply highlighting that over a week after Sidekick services went down, no one, not Microsoft nor T-Mobile have come forward giving us any explanation. Don’t you find that a bit strange? Usually they’ll say the simple “hardware failure”, “software glitch”, etc. Also, with the sheer number of users these companies support, you know they have back up servers and back up servers for the back up servers and then some. Everything has multiple copies. So why hasn’t at least one back server been launched or at least some functionality been brought back up? Could it really be sabotage and “dogfooding”.
I guess a small side note is appropriate right about now — Ever since Microsoft acquired Danger, the relationship hasn’t been exactly rosey. Microsoft loves taking smaller companies, eating them alive, poaching their talent, and then replacing all of the old companies technologies with their own. The problems are many, though the few that really stick out are (1) Danger was a small, close nit team that operated much more freely than your typical big corporate environment. Many people had access to all sorts of levels and data that would normally be limited to a select few in a larger company. (2) Danger’s servers ran Oracle Real Application Cluster, something Microsoft employees aren’t exactly taught during orientation or their first week on the job. (3) It’s no secret Microsoft is working on their own phone line — Pink — that was to use Danger/Sidekick team members to further Microsoft’s Project Pink. Not to mention, Sidekick technology was also supposed to be filtered (or “Dogfooding” to Microsoft employees) through Windows Phone and “Zune Phone” lines. Though previous contracts with T-Mobile and the Sidekick name have so far prevented that. This “dogfooding” is just a new verb created by those within Big M that describes Microsoft’s approach to quickly eradicate any foreign technology from within.
Coming back to the accusation above, the fact that so much back stabbing and high school drama has been going on behind closed doors, is it really so hard to believe that an angry, disgruntled employee wanted to “finish the job”? Quoting one of AppleInsider’s sources:
…The very long outage of core functionality, followed by an incapacity to recover any data, both point to the possibility that “someone with access to the servers at the datacenter must have inserted a time bomb to wipe out not just all of the data, but also all of the backup tapes, and finally, I suspect, reformatting the server hard drives so that the service itself could not be restarted with a simple reboot (and to erase any traces of the time bomb itself)
While some may discount this as simple fear mongering and stupid rumor, looking back at some of Microsoft’s other failed attempts at migrating acquisitions over to their own technologies (HoTMaiL and WebTV), one can ask themselves why they would try a third time on an environment they have little knowledge of? This so called sabotage could in fact be very real. With the servers and hard drives wiped out, the Oracle environment has to be re-installed on all of the servers. With the countless name changes and people moving that has gone on the last few months within Danger could very well mean their aren’t very many people left qualified enough to do such a monumental task.
Sadly, T-Mobile comes out the worst in all of this. Most consumers who won’t take it upon themselves to read into this issue will immediately blame the carrier, not to mention, the Sidekick name has been tightly woven into T-Mobile’s name. However, as we all know, Microsoft is the real person running the Sidekick ship with T-Mobile merely selling the device and providing service. T-Mobile will ultimately lose countless customers because of false beliefs that they are the reason for the problems while Microsoft escapes largely unharmed, reputation maybe tainted slightly, and the general consumer not even realizing who really destroyed their Sidekick. Sad isn’t it?
If you can only take one thing away from here, let it be this: that Microsoft, the money hungry beast that they are essentially destroyed (even before the now infamous data outage) Danger/Sidekick. The once great and rock solid service and hardware will probably sputter into irrelevance at the hands of the incompetent retards that head Microsoft. This problem isn’t going to go away anytime soon so I suggest following this as it develops. Quite interesting and eye raising to say the least.
I know you’ve got some opinions in your head. Let them fly…
Author: Mike Norris
visit my websiteGadget lover, smartphone collector, and beer connoisseur. I've been writing about gadgets for three years now and loving every minute of it. Outside of the digital landscape, I enjoy being active outdoors. I'm always up for a good conversation, so feel free to drop me a line!
