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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."
Not just buzz, it's the future bro.
here the damage to T-Mobile is compounded by their tone deafness on customer support.
Best Slashdot Co
Well, to be fair, whoever said 'All data is lost' to the press should have been dragged out back and shot. They should have said 'We're looking in to how long it will take to restore data, and to see if there will be any problems' and left it at that for a few days.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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.
Hey, at least this fiasco took the heat off their crappy network for a while.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Wow, this is a terrible blow for Microsoft. This might make people think that they produce unreliable products!
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();
"That could seriously damage the potential success of the firm's other 'cloud computing' plans, such as web-only editions of Office."
I can't tell whether this is spin put on the summary by the submitter or some other third-party (because we all know submitters are, absent any editorial constraints on /., free to post what they want without attribution). That said, it's highly unlikely Microsoft will suffer from this. Wisely, they offloaded all responsibility the moment they created this entity known as Danger. They've effectively washed their hands of the entire affair, because it wasn't really a Microsoft problem in the end, but a problem with an affiliated company.
It is simply wishful thinking on the part of the submitter (or whomever) that Microsoft will be tainted by this deal. In all likelihood, Microsoft will simply walk away from their relationship with Danger, and it will be business again as usual.
The worrisome part about cloud computing is putting your trust in someone else's hands. But keeping your backup process internal to the company is no panacea either. Bad management practice is what led to the cloud screwing up, just like bad management practice led to in-house data losses at other companies.
How many of you guys generate your own power 24x7? C'mon, you're really going to place the face of your business in the hands of people running off the wire? Wire power. Feh! That wire could be going anywhere. Real men run their own generators!
Sounds silly, right? Of course, that's only because we're used to power companies running like utilities, government-regulated monopolies allowed to exclusively service the public with a healthy, dependable profit in return for low rates and universal service. In such an environment having your own generators for anything other than emergencies is paranoia. But wow, you start deregulating things and let the businessmen go nuts and it almost seems like you'd have to.
The real question with cloud computing is whether the companies are going to operate in a fashion that brings to mind steady, sober, dependable service like a local utility, like a giant rapacious corporation uncaring of human concerns, or like a fly-by-night dotcom. My personal opinion is that I don't trust these fuckers. Current company's situation is that we have a major software product we run our business on and the publisher got gobbled up by a bigger company and that company got gobbled up by a bigger one. The big company has decided to discontinue the product and have been slowly dismantling the team that supports it. We know we're going to have to make a jump eventually but the conglomerate could pull the plug tomorrow and we'd still be in operation. If it was a cloud app, we could be dead in the water.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
What? That's not so bad. I mean if you really wanted a conspiracy theory you could surmise that MS bought Danger with some knowledge of how in bed they were with T-Mobile. AND seeing that one of the major carriers that Google's Android is T-Mobile, MS purposefully destroyed data to strike out against T-Mobile for partnering with their sworn enemy. Right now, Ballmer is sitting in his evil lair over an active volcano, cackling fitfully while stroking a white cat. Now THAT is a conspiracy theory.
Now that I said it, it doesn't seem unpossible. I better call Hollywood.
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.
Given how much of our internet access is being spied on by the government, how could ANYBODY want to trust their critical data to a cloud service? Sounds like Microsoft has Cumulonimbus clouds.
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.
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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.
So... in a year and a half they shouldn't have toured their new acquisition and checked for basic things
Or maybe have done all that before buying them... what the hell kind of mickey-mouse outfit would buy another company without examining their operations?
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?
"a server run by Microsoft-owned company Danger."
rename Microsoft to DangerOUS.
Yours In Ashgabat,
K. Trout
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."
If T-Mobile plasters their name on the contract, the device, and the service, then the buck stops there. Period. Internally, T-Mobile can choose to blame the Easter Bunny if they like, but ultimately, it was T-Mobile's responsibility to ensure that their customer's data was properly protected. This absolutely could have been prevented by audits of Microsofts/Danger's operations, checks of backup integrity, tighter contracts, etc. T-Mobile can go try and sue MS to get their damages back, but in the meantime, customers can, and should, be blaming (and suing) T-Mobile.
SirWired
A company called Danger? Responsible for data and servers? Yowsa! Red alert time!
What's up with all the editorializing in the summary?
You must be new here.
Danger was bought by MS only 18 months ago.
A year and a half later and they don't have a handle on it? Someone's getting paid WAY too much.
What the heck has this got to with Office and cloud computing
Nothing to do with office (unless they're using Access, which would explain the data loss), but "cloud computing" is what a couple here have more logically and less buzzwordily renamed "OPS" -- Other People's Servers. This is EXACTLY what "cloud computing" is.
Free Martian Whores!
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!
Or maybe have done all that before buying them... what the hell kind of mickey-mouse outfit would buy another company without examining their operations?
The kind of mickey-mouse outfit that's desperate for market share, particularly if that outfit isn't exactly late to the party (*cough* Windows CE / Mobile *cough*) and hasn't managed to capture a significant portion of it.
More Twoson than Cupertino
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.
BBC news reports today that Microsoft has in fact recovered all data
So here's what confuses me... "BBC news reports today that Microsoft has in fact recovered all data, but a minority are still affected." If all the data has been recovered, wouldn't NO ONE still be affected? I mean... being affected by this means your data was lost in such a way that it couldn't be recovered. So...
BBC news reports today that Microsoft has in fact recovered all data, but a minority are still affected (out of 1 million subscribers)
At this point, the name Microsoft is pretty much a synonym for danger.
But the damage is not limited to Microsoft's reputation, the damage extends to the concept behind 'cloud computing', whatever that is. I think it is safe to say that Microsoft will recover from this incident, after all, it's record is already pretty suspect, but cloud computing will have this example hanging over it from now on.
I doubt that people will take this as a lesson that Microsoft is not to be trusted or believed since they are the public face of computing, but that computing generally, and 'cloud computing' is what's untrustworthy. Microsoft can abandon this particular project, coin a new term to replace 'cloud computing', and move on.
This is an opening for Google or other competitors. Will they step up and displace Microsoft as the public face of computing? We can be rid of monolithic operating systems if someone can make a system that boots a minimal browser/front-end that connects to the internet. A combination of BIOS and replaceable flash drive. Sell flash drives with the kernel and the drivers for the display/keyboard and network interface.
Best regards.
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?
Oh sorry, it's the bash MS article of the day. Please continue.
Ugggh, if you can't stand the bash-wagon, get off the bus.
Don't forget: the other half of the evil plan is to turn Danger into a fuckup so massive that it spreads fear, uncertainty, and doubt over the entire enterprise of cloud computing, thus saving MS' client and server software from Google....
Microsoft Corporate Vice President Roz Ho says that all data will be restored, beginning with personal contacts.
She believes that only a minority of Sidekick users are still affected.
This is the quote in full context. There was no data loss.
Just because customers may still be affected by the outage does not automatically mean that they lost data. As a matter of fact, a statement like "recovered ALL data" should tip you off to the fact.
"But this one goes to 11!"
How would buying Danger get more market share for WinCE or WinMo?
It's kind of like having a reference customer. It's all very well showing that they are incompetent in theory. It's good to be able to set up the production servers and run load tests. Here we have a real life demo that MS can really damage loads of customer's data. There are always cynics who say "yes, but they won't be able to do it in production". Now nobody will be able to claim that MS can't do an up to date full scale cloud screw up.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
But Microsoft, which bears at least part of the responsibility for the mistake, is paying the price with its reputation.
I don't see it. MS is one of those companies people either love or hate. The lovers will say "shit happens, move on" and the haters will say "I told you so". Sum tot = zip.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
Yes, the "but a minority are still affected" was referring to a previous line talking about them getting all the data full restored.
So, only somewhere between 1 and 499,999 users are still affected, then?
Or is there racial profiling going on here, too?
*Still* negative function...
Who decides that a server farm called "Danger" is a safe place to store backups?
The kind of outfit that never wanted the operations. Microsoft wanted experienced cellphone people but didn't discover until after they purchased Danger that they couldn't move the developers to other products until after the Sidekick was delivered.
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
But once you're large enough to need to hire someone to manage the grunt work, you're putting your privacy, security and accountability in their hands. It doesn't really matter if they're in house or contracted out.
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 google for things on Bing.
I bang things on google.
Hey, it was the last time he checked :)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
except word out on the street is that Microsoft moved over the vast majority of the Danger employees who stayed over to Microsoft's Ping Project and left the Danger division seriously under staffed. It also is going around that Microsoft had been telling T-Mobile that everything at Danger was fine and they were putting much effort into improving the software. In other words, they were lying to T-Mobile to keep T-Mobile selling the products and paying lots of money when Microsoft was really just putting the division on life-support and biding their time in hopes that Project Pink would produce something Microsoft could move Danger customers over to.
So is there NOT a reason to blame Microsoft for any of this? I guess you also don't remember all the talk about Microsoft trying to get the Danger product moved onto a Windows platform instead of it's BSD and Java platform. Microsoft is well known for either buying a competitor and shutting them down or buying them and dictating the product be ported to Windows. They bashed the engineers at SoftImage for a few years on dropping the UNIX versions of their software even though they did get a Windows version running. Customers and engineers didn't want Windows and wanted to keep the UNIX versions. Microsoft finally sold the company and walked away with its tail between its legs and you can see by what the film industry uses that Windows was not welcome much in that environment. BSODs really piss off people who spend hours crunching data and don't see BSODs or the like on nix boxes. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
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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.
Liar. Everyone knows that Slashdotters are all virgins. Especially the Anonymous Cowards.
All Problem solved.
If I had mod points, you'd get +1 Funny.
Given that I used up the last of them yesterday, I'll settle for, "Irony of ironies. All is irony."
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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.
This is much like when MS bought Hotmail and promptly screwed it up in their attempt to move it to Windows servers.
"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.
If I call T-Mobile about my G1 and complain that it doesn't actually delete emails that I delete, or that the maps sometimes don't show me where a business is actually located correctly, or that I inevitable have to wipe after an OTA release, I get any of several variations on '...it's not our software, sir'. Of course, I am directed to the forums, where I can bitch and moan, but still, after 4 major releases, POP email isn't actually deleted.
I call Google, and, no, wait, I have only forums and blogs to correspond with Google about this. The issue is known since launch, and still not fixed. Google has no statement about this because they don't even bother to acknowledge the issue 'officially'.
The Open Handset Alliance? Ha! That's funny!
Other releases? I have no idea if Cyanogen's release has a new email app, but I suspect it doesn't. Ditto for JF and the rest.
So holding up T-Mobile for this Sidekick fiasco will be equally pointless.
But, I suspect, TMO is seriously reconsidering selling Sidekicks. And Danger is probably begging them to not destroy their business.
And Microsoft will do just fine, no matter what.
This is the treatment you get when the big corps decide 'good enough' is good enough.
Now, will someone further explore why they would consider buying a Hitachi SAN system? I won't. Ever.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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)
data had been permanently lost due to a problem with a server run by Microsoft-owned company Danger.
Is that like saying "The pedestrian was injured by Mr. Smith's car, a Mercedes?"
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Troll? I see somebody needs to view a certain episode of Seinfeld...
I have a Sidekick.
I still, a week later, can't get e-mail on it. My contacts were never lost, but the damn thing still doesn't work! I'm getting tired of waiting.
My contract is up in August and I'm going to find a phone that stores everything locally AND a new provider. I have learned my lesson.
> "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.
>>
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?
That's not what happened... of course they were doing backups. Apparently the issue (still stupid, but slightly less so) is that a backup started *while* they were updating the SAN, so the backup got corrupted. And also stupid, apparently they didn't have a very recent backup of the backup...
That's not how backups work. You don't overwrite one set of media over and over, because during the backup itself, you have no backup. The absolute minimum number of copies is two, because then you still have one good backup while overwriting one set of media. Also, for backups to be useful, they usually need to be made at least daily.
What you described there is an asynchronous mirror, which is not that much protection. Secondly, from what I've seen happen during SAN upgrades, they first thing they do is disable all scheduled tasks, all mirrors, etc... Once the update has succeeded, then the engineer turns stuff back on one thing at a time. Doing an update while some major process is going on is insane.
Realistically, a hosted system like this should have some huge tape library, and dozens of copies going back at least a month or two, just in case there's a need to recover from ongoing data corruption. For the amount of data involved in this case, this is a relatively cheap and ordinary setup.
The real scary part of cloud hosting is that most of the really big hosts (Google, Amazon, etc...) can't afford 'proper' backups. They just mirror their data around a couple of times, and hope it's good enough. Read up on Google FS (GFS). They don't even replicate out of a data center yet, so if they lose a building from some disaster like an earthquake or fire, they'd lose hundreds of petabytes of data. That was acceptable for their web index, as they can always re-crawl the web, but I'm surprised they're doing hosting now with the same underlying technology.
I disagree - it is better public relations to 'take a dump' in one quick hit, and hope that it doesn't make too much of a splash. Otherwise you sit around for a week until a slow news day comes, and your story ends up on the front page, while the customers get more nervous.
By getting out the bad news early, anything that happens (like a partial recovery of data in this case) looks like good news, so that reputation can be partly salvaged.
True. But 18 months later is a different mater. Most of what has come out of this is that the operation has been fully taken over by MS staff.
I use to work for T-Mobile, and if you think for one minute that this interuption is going to cost T-Mobile, you're kidding yourself.
T-Mobile makes mad, mad money. This doesn't hurt them one bit. They are not loosing a single cent, even if they give money back to their customers, because it's all "expected income".
And it's only just and right that a huge Telco that rips off it's customers has to finally payout for a their screw up.
This didn't hurt T-Mobile at all, it hurt the customers who are locked into that damn 2 year contract! GO BOOST OR CRICKET!
and this kind of lack of due diligence creates a problem that would be an insult to any real Mickey-Mouse (tm) operation
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Well, since this is /., you take your car in for a routine oil change. The mechanic botches the job.
Yeah, that sounds about right. That's why I try to do my own oil changes when I can.
The worst, though, is the state inspection. Without fail, something always seems to fail after one of those for me. Next time I'm going to demand they let me watch the work being done.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Hyped as Usual.
How much of a "big financial" hit is Tmo really taking, $130 (100+month's data service) off per specific sidekick users? That's likely 25% of the Tmo user base, not all of it. And those users are likely longtime customers too, so the hit is not too bad (like given them a free phone upgrade honestly, no biggie). That's why T-mobile is doing it: good customer service, and it's not that expensive. Good move T-Mobile, even though it was MS's problem!
As for MS, it is a hit to their reputation, but still doesn't effect the enterprise users, which is where MS will get its cloud computing gold nuggets. Remember, public consumers get cloud services for free nowdays and don't have problems switching to another cloud service. Enterprise users pay for theirs and usually resist moving services once committed.
Welcome to new cloud services, the same as old local IT network services. Not much different really (made sense they would recover the data cause it's still in a IT Datacenter)...
Ever heard of Pink? Maybe you should follow MS plans a little closer?
MSFT is on the NYSE and it's tracking the S&P for the last decade so close it may as well be an index fund (a net loss). Since March of 2003 (coincidentally(?)) when the whole SCO thing started MS is up 12%. AAPL for example of a company that doesn't track the S&P is up 2400%. I know which one I'd rather have in my retirement fund - the one that grows faster than stuffing the cash in your mattress.
But, hey, a moribund stock mired antitrust concerns and walled off from new markets by gross incompetence can still break out and be a big winner, amiright? This whole Yahoo partnership could work out well for Microsoft (we all know what's going to happen to Yahoo). Bing could be a huge success. Google could decide to lose everybody's email and documents. Everybody and their brother could decide to migrate to W7 overnight because it does stuff their current OS doesn't do. Microsoft could have a secret phone project that gets over the fact that they've hosed over their relationship with every phone provider on the planet, and a phone OS that isn't WiMo 6.5. They could make a creative alliance with the TV vendors, the movie studios, the music industry and Sony that allows them to take over the consumer electronics space. And monkeys could fly out of my butt.
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I used to work on a team at Microsoft who heavily relied on the services of the data center, and if you only knew the shenanigans and the complete incompetence of some of the people responsible for some of the servers, you'd realize that not even Microsoft is immune from stupid admins.
Google does not rely on outside providers and they're the index case for cloud computing. You can roll your own cloud and Mark Shuttleworth at Ubuntu is working on that for you. If you do it right you can build your own cloud. What third party clouds offer you in that case is on-demand compute resources and bandwidth.
The cloud thing is going to happen but a lot of people don't understand what it is. It doesn't mean giving up control of your data. It doesn't mean giving up control of your interface. What it does is provide on-demand compute and bandwidth resources for spikes in demand. A cloud hosting provider can absorb excess demand for access to your data by absorbing spikes in demand until you have time to buy, receive and provision servers to support that demand. It's like an insurance policy against the sudden growth we all know happens when you do the right stuff.
Nobody in their right mind would host all their data on a third party's cloud. But cloud providers DO provide a valuable and necessary service.
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HP servers running Unix. Hitachi SAN. Oracle RAC. Java.
To this stable solution add one MCSE engineer. WARNING : Solution may be hypergolic.
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For now.
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Being part of a company that was recently acquired I have some insight. Our conversion plan is absurdly aggressive and we're still looking at 6 months. The buying company won't come in, see your problems, and ask you to fix them with your own processes before converting you. Rather the buying company will come in, see what you have, and figure out how to merge it with their own systems/processes.
I don't think this is really true, but if I were a conspiracy nut - I might consider this a brilliant move by Microsoft. They get the data back (insulation from lawsuits) yet manage to scare people away from the biggest threat to their market share in decades - the cloud! Don't put your email onto GoogleApps - buy Exchange, retain control.
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?
I'm a victim of a botched oil change. In my case, I ended up doing most of my vehicle maintenance myself and I found a different company to do the complicated stuff.
Given that there's very likely an SLA involved w/ Dang^H^H^H^HMicrosoft for hosting the service, I suspect that T-Mobile will do just that (that is, try to sue Microsoft into the Stone Age).
T-Mobile will probably also eat a legal shit sandwich, courtesy of the first lawyer to find an affected Sidekick user who can spell "Class Action" successfully and can sign his or her name legibly on a piece of paper.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
To the person who said it, that the data was unrecoverable was true. Unfortunately for them the implications of losing a million people's personal data is not a normal case. In that case some heroic data recovery options are available, including engaging every person involved in design and implementation of the storage from the platter up, at whatever rate they ask, for the duration of the emergency. Problems that involve a half-billion dollars merit that level of intervention.
A remarkable job for the MS crew here. Kudos to everybody except the twit that lost everybody's data.
Do I want a MS thin client phone now? Why I'm glad you asked. No. Hell no. Are you freaking kidding? NO!
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Like every other cellular provider T-Mobile sells bandwidth and connectivity and nothing more. It's true they should have inspected their partner more closely, especially when Microsoft acquired them, but the provision of data services is actually not within the scope of the things that they do. Maybe after this bandwidth providers like T-Mobile, QWest, Sprint and AT&T might consider the risks involved in third party data service providers, but that's tomorrow, not today.
It's fair to say that people are bashing Microsoft here, but it's not fair to say that the bashing is unfair. Microsoft bought the company and it's required that they do due diligence. If they overlooked something, at closing it's still their fault. That's what closing is about. It's about transferring responsibility for future issues from the seller to the buyer.
If this issue had arisen shortly after closing there might be some argument about this, but a year and a half is long enough to prove that the system was as advertised at time of sale. So if Microsoft hosed it up afterward, that's their fault. There is some evidence that it was working fine right up until Microsoft decided it needed to run on Microsoft technologies, at which point all indicators pointed south.
I see that the MS blog center is all over this issue and I fully expect to be modded down repeatedly. The hateful beatdown is already in progress on public sites like CNET. Hopefully there's been some education in the blog center about that, because it would be unfortunate to have to make this a crusade.
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You are very close to the truth here, but you're not quite there yet. The difference is the muddled incompetence of Microsoft's phone strategy and the evil competence of their overarching strategy. They really need a phone strategy, and they placed their faith that they could get one in Roz Ho.
They put her in charge of the Premium Media eXperience. Their bad.
So they've got this Zune phone project, and they know that Zune Phone is going to get as much lift as the Zune, ie, lead balloon. They stretch out a half $B to get some smartphone props with the stuggling inventor of the smartphone, SideKick and Danger. They've got to stretch this to their new "Pink" phone but it turns out due diligence doesn't extend to examining the term "exclusive".
They need to knife their bandwidth provider T-Mobile in a Legal sanctioned way to escape the exclusivity of this contract and sell their own-branded phones with own-branded backing services to any and all bandwidth providers, so a good wide outage should do it.
Hence, the need to jerk around a million T-mobile users.
The sad thing is, this strategy is working. Much like their efforts with Sendo, they are carefully worming their way into cellular phones. There is always someone who is desperate enough to deal with them even though they know they're selling their soul to the devil.
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Take both power cords (all HA servers have two power cords) and yank them out in the middle of the day. If anybody at all notices that you did that, it's not an HA server. For extra points hit your Cisco switch with a Tazer first.
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The contribution to the computer sciences of the Reverend Dodgson are oft overlooked. He was a CS major and his colorful works were IT manuals that take some digesting. It is said that a full understanding of "Alice in Wonderland" will suffice as background for a full IT career.
What I tell you three times is true. This is the rule. A fact that is recorded in three geographically disparate locations (each more than 50 miles apart), did happen. A fact that is not so recorded is open to debate. Often that there is a question, regardless of what the answer is, is a career ending event.
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HA! :P
I am my wife
This is the sig that says NI (again)
To be honest... As another blogger posted, MS's core competency is varpour-ware.. I think some of MS's alliances and product annoucements are more designed to hinder other competitors or technologies..
"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? :-)
Insert
"BBC news reports today that Microsoft has in fact recovered all data, but a minority are still affected (out of 1 million subscribers)"
correction: BBC news reports today that Microsoft claimed it has recovered all the data.
"I used to work on a team at Microsoft who heavily relied on the services of the data center, and if you only knew the shenanigans and the complete incompetence of some of the people responsible for some of the servers, you'd realize that not even Microsoft is immune from stupid admins"
It begs the question as to why MS has to outsource its own cloud services to a third party. Unless it's the people at the top trying to save money by doing things on the cheap. An IT manager who isn't technically trained. Low cost hardware with no redundancy and low cost ms certified 'IT' staff. The staff leaving/hiring cycle being so fast that there isn't a familiar face there after ten months.
Microsoft today implemented its 100% Data Confidentiality package for T-Mobile Sidekick, comprehensively protecting users’ contacts, email and messages from any possible attacker.
“Our data security is impenetrable,” said Steve Ballmer, “and will reassure everyone of the data integrity of our Windows Azure Screen Of Death cloud computing and Windows Mobile initiatives.”
Microsoft plans to leverage the new confidentiality mechanism to finally purge the horror of Vista from the face of the earth, in the same manner as firing all the contractors who knew how to build Windows 2000 and having to reconstruct Windows XP from bits of NT 4.
Microsoft Sharepoint users looked forward to a similar denouement as the only safe way to scour their hopelessly incompetent organisations from the world in a manner that would not infect successor organisations.
Microsoft is putting together an outsourcing proposal to the UK government for data protection.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I think this is more like 1984 scandal of Amazon Kindle, it will have long time impact on cloud computing and the general direction of things to come.
Even if you invent a system about e-ink/store tomorrow which has NOTHING to do with Amazon Kindle, you will still be asked "but will you delete my books remotely?". Just like some dead tech acquired by MS and not managed well will cost even IBM Mainframe dept. sales.
If one is a hopeless conspiracy theorist, he can easily suggest MS did it on purpose to lower general public trust to cloud which they have almost nothing. Cloud is all open source empire right now, Apache Hadoop etc. are being talked about, not some MS enterprise server or technology.
Shhhhhhh! Steve Ballmer knows exactly what he's doing. Now if you'll excuse me I have to load up on some Apple stock.
I know one person in the "minority," and she has still not had anything recovered as of 8PM CST Thursday, Oct 16 and she says she knows two other people with the same status. The kicker is she was required to get a Sidekick for her job working with deaf people (for TTY support? I don't really know, but that brand was required).
Incidentally, I' had heard MS pushed MS-SQL servers into the Danger server room, and this is bad press more for MS-SQL than MS as a whole.
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this concept. Why would the spamers not just exploit the vulnerabilities in the Microsoft anti-spam solution? No doubt the Microsoft solution involved executing every attachment to ensure that it was safe, which would have compromised their filtering engine in under 50ms.
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