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MS Says All Sidekick Data Recovered, But Damage Done
nandemoari writes "T-Mobile is taking a huge financial hit in the fallout over the Sidekick data loss. But Microsoft, which bears at least part of the responsibility for the mistake, is paying the price with its reputation. As reported earlier this week, the phone network had to admit that some users' data had been permanently lost due to a problem with a server run by Microsoft-owned company Danger. The handset works by storing data such as contacts and appointments on a remote computer rather than on the phone itself. BBC news reports today that Microsoft has in fact recovered all data, but a minority are still affected (out of 1 million subscribers). Amidst this, Microsoft appears not to have suffered any financial damage. However, it seems certain that its relationship with T-Mobile will have taken a major knock. The software giant is also the target of some very bad publicity as critics question how on earth it failed to put in place adequate back-ups of the data. That could seriously damage the potential success of the firm's other 'cloud computing' plans, such as web-only editions of Office."
It is hard for me to blame T-Mobile for the MS/Danger server / backups failure. Danger both makes the phones and runs the service, where as T-Mobile appear to be little more than common carriers and the customer service department. It is a bit unreasonable to suggest that T-Mobile could have prevented the outage. I mean it not like they could host the data somewhere else right? Sure they could have done a much better job handling the failure after it happened, much much better, but I just don't think they could have prevented it.
Worth repeating every time. Nobody cares if you back up your data. Take a blank server; take whatever it is that you store offsite. If you can turn the blank server into your production system then you are fine. If you can't then your strategy is failing. If you never try it then you are an amateur.
This incompetence is something far beyond serious for MS. T-mobile is a much bigger customer than almost anyone short of vodafone can ever hope to be. MS have been moving strategically into hosting servers such as exchange for many customers. If you're a CEO you should be calling your CIO in and asking him when he plans to be free of MS services. If you are a CIO you want to be able to answer "there's nothing business critical relying on MS services" by the time that meeting comes.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
From stories circulating it looks as if they are doing this by recovering the structure of the database, not restore from backup. Note that they say that most customers should have all data restored. Not just "data up to last week" or something similar. Of course this could all just be misplaced speculation and misunderstandings.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
What's up with all the editorializing in the summary? Danger was bought by MS only 18 months ago. What the heck has this got to with Office and cloud computing except wishful thinking by the submitter?
So... in a year and a half they shouldn't have toured their new acquisition and checked for basic things like:
1) Updated server software
2) Firewalls
3) Backups
And other "yer an idjit if you don't do this" kinda stuff?
For *any* kind of hosted service, having backups measures just slightly below "is it turned on" in terms of importance. And for a year and a half, NONE WERE DONE? Further, they did a major update to a SAN and didn't backup first?
This isn't about bashing Microsoft - highly successful businesses have had to close shop forever due to glaring, horrid oversights like this. This is gross incompetence.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Er... because it is a form of cloud computing which failed? When a failure like this occurs, it rightfully raises doubt as to the reliability of other cloud computing services, one of which happens to involve office.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Years of BSODS.
Years of viruses.
Years of trojans.
Yet THIS "damages Microsoft's reputation"?!?!?!
Well, it's a bit of a non sequitur, to be sure. But the whole incident spells out in stark detail the dangers of "cloud computing", or as us folks who actually have worked with computers for more than than ten minutes call it; the client-server model. When explained as what it really is, it's a matter of ensuring adequate and timely backups. When described in some pathetic marketing term, it sounds like some magical new way of computing, no longer constrained by those old-fashioned good practices.
Quite frankly, I would never ever ever put any mission critical data or apps on a system that I couldn't back end the data on my own out of. If I can't move my data out of the app, then my data never gets there in the first place.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You really don't see the connection?
Yesterday, you put all your cell phone contacts and calendar data up in the "cloud".
Today, your data is lost.
Tomorrow, the same companies responsible for losing your cell phone data now want to take over all your Office documents.
Well, since this is /., you take your car in for a routine oil change. The mechanic botches the job.
Are you going to go back to the same mechanic for a transmission rebuild?
Perhaps for people who don't care about their data... Privacy, security, accountability and reliability cannot be ensured by a third party. I'll keep my data in-house thank you.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Cloud computing and remote storage are not necessarily the same.
What we see here is a small device storing it's data remotely and I wonder why.
Considering how cheap a couple of GB of memory are and how precious wireless bandwidth is this can mean only one thing, having and thus exploiting that data is worth more than the cost of the bandwidth.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I don't see this as having a big effect on Microsoft. T-Mobile on the other hand....
I don't believe that customers care if your services providers have problems. They have an agreement with you, not your providers.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Except that people make decisions and don't really care if something is just "affiliated".
Microsoft and Google bid for the "cloud computing" "office" contract at some company. Do you really think Google isn't going to mention, with a bunch of references, this screw up?
With quotes from press releases like:
in big bold blocks.
They have not had this problem in their first 8 years. Then, 18 months after Microsoft acquires them, they have a critical failure. You think that's all coincidence?
I suppose it's possible for one company to buy another and leave the company alone, but Microsoft certainly didn't do this. They moved most of the developers to Project Pink (and most of them have left MS entirely by now). I think it's pretty clear that the new MS was responsible. They managed the company. The data was stored at Microsoft's data centers.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to sell people on the idea that their data should be hosted at Microsoft data centers. Am I not supposed to be skeptical about this now?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Last I checked, Hotmail still ran on FreeBSD
Which was what? 8 years ago?
In fact, yes, people have lost data from Google. That isn't even the only example one can find.
Man, what fantasyland are your utilities located in? I wanna move there! In my experience, utilities *are* "giant rapacious corporation uncaring of human concerns".
Perhaps for people who don't care about their data... Privacy, security, accountability and reliability cannot be ensured by a third party. I'll keep my data in-house thank you.
Dude, organizations use third party data centers (or data centers that they physically own but are managed by a 3rd party) all the time w/o a glitch. Unless you are a software giant (like ebay or amazon) that can build your own data center, or are a minor/midsize operation (or are just a guy with a home computer), you will inevitably have a large part of your stuff either running on someone else's infrastructure or having it operate on someone else's watch.
It is done all the time, by many, for years now. Almost no glitches that can be directly attributed by the fact that a 3rd party was involved. In order to have a meaningful opinion on IT operations, you need to differentiate problems that occur because things are not run by you (things that are inevitable in computing) vs problems that occur because of lack of safeguards or wrong procedures (which can and will happen under your watch or someone else's.)
i dunno.... this data loss and subsequent PR fallout is one way.. it's nearly all aimed smack at tmobile..
microsoft will come out of this unscathed, and PR for them will shift to back to the feel-good fluff pieces surrounding the release of win7.
If you can setup offline synchronization and data encryption, there is no reason to not use cloud computing.
All a local backup will give me is reliability.
If I can't encrypt my data on their servers I don't really have privacy or security.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Microsoft sure seams to have a wicked spell of utter incompetence cast upon them. Anything they tuch turns to crap.
Nobody in their right mind will put anything even remotely important in a cloud ran by Microsoft.
HTTP/1.1 400
If you really want a conspiracy theory, toss in that another factor Microsoft considered was that Danger uses Unix servers, Oracle RAC, Java apps, and Hitachi SAN software. No sign of any significant Windows technology. So, they purposefully destroy the data. That not only hits T-Mobile, per your proposed conspiracy theory, but also hits Oracle and Unix and Java, and it shakes confidence in the whose Cloud idea.
Google and Amazon are ahead of MS right now in Cloud stuff, so if Microsoft can throw a delay into that sector, it hurts Google and Amazon more than it hurts Microsoft. By the time people get over the fright and are ready to jump back in, Microsoft will have its cloud offering out, AND they can point out that all major cloud failures have been on Unix or Linux, and with non-MS databases and app servers--and argue that if you want to get back into the cloud, go with MS on Windows servers, MSSQL databases, and .NET apps.
The problem with proposing fun conspiracy theories like you and I are doing, though, is that the real conspiracy theorists are already there. I've already seen several of the tin-foil hat crowd saying it was on purpose.
I seem to remember Microsoft buying Hotmail back in the 90s, and royally screwing up its operations in much less than 18 months. They tried to move to Windows servers very quickly, and it was a disaster, and they were forced to go back to their FreeBSD infrastructure for a while.
Maybe something similar happened here.
I bet that most companies, when buying other companies, don't check a lot of basic things before buying them. As for "mickey-mouse outfit", in my experience, most corporations fit that definition well. The people running them really aren't that smart, and make all kinds of dumb mistakes.
Microsoft has been employing and run by Americans since it started, and they've produced nothing but buggy crap.
Meanwhile, the Mars rovers have been a tremendous success, built by American engineers using American-made software I believe (I'm pretty sure they use vxWorks). This is the epitome of software reliability I think.
I don't think nationality has much to do with this one.
"But Microsoft, which bears at least part of the responsibility for the mistake, is paying the price with its reputation."
Microsoft bears ALL THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MISTAKE!
They own Danger and they run the data center that stores the data!
It was their fault 100%.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Contracts with corporations are stacked in the corporations' favor.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
The "Pink" project was a Microsoft creation based on their technology, NOT a Danger product. It was the brainchild of Microsoft's Roz Ho. Microsoft may have bought a terribly run company, but that happens all the time in the real world. After a year and a half under the leadership of Microsoft, problems can no longer be blamed on the previous company's leadership. Most of those people don't even work there anymore. It's all on Microsoft's head.
The problem is not that the Danger division is run like a separate company. The problem is that every little division of Microsoft is run like a separate company. That's their biggest flaw, and they really need to get an effective leader (as in replace Steve Ballmer) who isn't afraid to fire anyone who is more concerned about protecting his/her own empire than with the good of the company. That pretty much means replacing large swaths of the management hierarchy. That's the only thing that will save Microsoft from eventual total failure. That or a huge government bailout in twenty years for being "too big to fail".
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You really don't see the connection?
Yesterday, you put all your cell phone contacts and calendar data up in the "cloud".
Today, your data is lost.
Tomorrow, the same companies responsible for losing your cell phone data now want to take over all your Office documents.
The phrasing of this sounds chilling until one realizes that the main point here is that you still want to keep your own local copy. The T-Mobile phones should have done that. You should do that when creating documents on-line.
This is such a silly reason to vilify 'the cloud'.
From where I sit, the problem started when some guy wearing a tie said "and the phones use the server exclusively to house the data!" Dumb. The 'cloud' shouldn't even be part of this discussion.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Looms = non cloud computing.
That is a bit of a stretch.
I think ppl can use OSS & Linux and use VPN's like Open VPN and
say that whatever crap comes out of M$ is not worth using.
There are already DNS issues, and other Internet Infrastructure issues
and relying on a system that is burdened with massive spam, torrent,
and email data is a recipe for disaster.
Do not talk to me about Telcos taking care of that.
Their track records are WELL known.
http://www.tispa.org/node/14
$200 billion in tax payer money pissed away on TOTAL lies.
The cloud is a spider web built on greed and broken
promises and lies just like our banking and a good
portion of our government.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
And vista works so dreamily....
Riiiiiight....
Windows 7 is Vista SP2 and it is semi-decent.
The best bet for true corporate computing is blade servers running Linux and using virtualization
of a M$ OS so they do not have to shell out for a bunch of licenses.
M$ hates that by the way, and is trying to much up VMware for that very reason.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
> "The outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back up,"
> [Microsoft Corporate Vice President Roz Ho] wrote in an open letter to customers.
It sounds like their "backup" was a replica on another connected server.
No actual offline backups at all.
When JournalSpace was destroyed, one SlashDot thread was "Why Mirroring Is Not a Backup Solution".
My favorite comment was by JoelKatz:
>> The whole point of a backup is that it is *stable*. Neither copy is stable, so there is no ... if the active copy of the data is corrupted, there is no backup.
>> "backup on the hardware level". There are two active systems.
>>
>> If you cannot restore an accidentally-deleted file from it, it's not a backup.
>>
I think you missed the point:
- With software you own, you can ignore Microsoft's mistakes (Office2007, Vista) and continue using their older products (Office2003 or 97, XP).
- With software you rent off the internet (cloud), the bad ideas are shoved upon you whether you like them or not.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"But Microsoft, which bears at least part of the responsibility for the mistake, is paying the price with its reputation"
Just out of curiosity, what reputation might that be? :-)
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