Microsoft gives overoptimistic timescale
Well who'd of thunk it.
T-Mobile, although not smelling of Roses over this, at least are not smelling of the stuff you grow Roses in. That seams to be emanating from Redmond.
Microsoft played spot the difference over the weekend with statements on Saturday and Sunday that hinted at “steady progress” for the recovery of data its Danger subsidiary lost for many Sidekick customers. The data loss cockup was sparked by a major server outage at Danger, which provides data services to T-Mobile customers, …
Does Microsoft really need to make itself look THIS stupid? I can't imagine the stupidity that was required to get themselves into this hole in the first place, this is just making it even worse. How can it take this long to solve? Is anyone going to trust Microsoft's cloud offerings in the future?
what do you expect Microsoft to do with that? They have always been willing to lose money on something which give their OS support and they do not care about income from products which are not exclusively tied to their Windows platform.
Is this really a screwup or is this really some plan to jettison the Danger platform? Remember, outside of MS Office for the Mac, they don't do anything but Windows. So this could be a case where they want to bring out something to replace this( Pink? ) or just maybe they've figured it was time to kill off yet another Java based platform?
As far as anyone believing public comments from Microsoft goes, you've got to be quite naive to do that. Didn't Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer change their middle names to "Spin" over a decade ago? They've been at this for twice that long.
Paris because she knows how to spin too.
Love the line
"We apologise that this is taking so long, but we want to make sure we are doing everything possible to maintain the integrity of your data"
It's the word "maintain" which makes me giggle!
The internet is an unstable place, and the bigger you make the potential loss when failure occurs, the more precautions you'd better take to ensure close to 100% uptime if you can. Virgin lost a router and its' backup in Winnersh recently, causing a large chunk of the west of london area to lose internet connectivity - including my office, which uses a virgin media link to hook up to our base site further up the country. We were cut off for a fair while, a few hours, but it's a cautionary tale.
If you value your data, don't send it off into the webs and expect it to be safe - apart from the phishers, stuff like the sidekick debacle can happen. Back up locally and archive to optical media / etc as well as convenient clouds...
Then again, if you back up locally and to more permanent media why bother with the cloud?
While I am by no means a Microsoft apologist, your assessment of the company as a whole is incredibly narrow.
First off, if they wanted to kill Java, they would have to develop something to replace it and be fairly well compatible (note I said "fairly well,") and doing so requires that someone know Java thoroughly. Secondly, they certain do not and have not ever only done Office on the Mac outside of Windows. At the very least Microsoft has offered Unix integration kits for quite some time, having also developed their own flavor of Unix back when doing so was considered Tres.
And in the end, as we know better know, the Danger system, which is a subsidiary of Microsoft, was run on Sun Solaris machines with Oracle database back-ends. The failure is only minimally the fault of Microsoft, and I assure you that when Danger called Mama in to help, Mama had people on-hand more than capable of handling the situation
Paris, because she knows better than to feed the trolls.
The rumour is they did have one backup:
Just before a planned upgrade, the techies started a new backup - on top of the only back because they did not have anywhere else to put it. After two days, the PHB got impatient and was not prepared to wait another four days for the backup to be completed (LOTS of data). She decided to halt the backup and proceed with the upgrade.
When your PHB won't shell out for a second set of backup media, you know your setup is being cost cut to shreds.
Microsoft 'encouraged' the incubent techies to leave, then installed their own (I won't call them techies) who knew nothing about a very complex database. Then they ignored the warnings of the remaining techies. When things went tits up their guys tried to muddle though without asking the remaining few that actually had a clue - because they couldn't admit they screwed the pooch.
Interestingly there had been no significant failures of the system previously.
Further lies:
Claims it was linux/BSD - it was a bespoke OS.
Claims it was sabotage - How convenient.
Claims it was everyone's fault but theirs - bollix.
1/10 troll harder
Where have you been hiding?
Though, I'll grant you that calls from MS to Sun's tech support may be on hold for a while. "We're experiencing larger than normal call volume... You may expect to wait another [cough, until hell freezes over! ha ha ha ha ha] minutes for the next available representative."
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/10/15/microsofts-pinkdanger-backup-problem-blamed-on-roz-ho/
Interesting article (as part of a series of articles) on this over at Roughly Drafted. Take the usual grain of salt, but having sifted the definite wheat from the potential chaff, I'd say this looks like a major cockup that has a lot more to do with MS' management and culture than any backend software/hardware issues. I'm not sure if this is 100% confirmed what happened, but it is certainly all too believable.