“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,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.
“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,” Dilger reports.
“AppleInsider previously broke the story that Microsoft’s Roz Ho launched an exploratory group to determine how the company could best reach the consumer smartphone market, identified Danger as a viable acquisition target, and then made a series of catastrophic mistakes that resulted in both the scuttling of any chance that Pink prototypes would ever appear, as well as allowing Danger’s existing datacenter to fail spectacularly, resulting in lost data across the board for T-Mobile’s Sidekick users,” Dilger reports.
Full article here.
Looks like another Microsoft Cloud server failure.
Microshaft could under cook sushi.
Ah, and “Azure” finally becomes clearer. Microsoft’s entire business model is threatened by the cloud, so their “plan” for cloud computing is simply to kill it through FUD. Hello Azure, cloudless sky.
Forecast for Redmond: Cloudy with a chance of stupid.
Tomorrow: Room temperature….
Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
While the sabotage angle certainly has possibilities, there’s plenty of stupidity going on at Microsoft already, which could certainly be sufficient to explain what happened.
Apple can now potentially buy out T-mobile and tell AT&T;to eat it
“Danger” could be a prophetic name for this Microsoft owned service. Do you think that Microsoft will be putting warning labels on the rest of their products and services?
These two paragraphs are a great review of MS.
To the engineers familiar with Microsoft’s internal operations who spoke with us, that suggests two possible scenarios. First, that Microsoft decided to suddenly replace Danger’s existing infrastructure with its own, and simply failed to carry this out. Danger’s existing system to support Sidekick users was built using an Oracle Real Application Cluster, storing its data in a SAN (storage area network) so that the information would be available to a cluster of high availability servers. This approach is expressly designed to be resilient to hardware failure.
Microsoft is well known for wanting to replace competitor’s technologies with its own. The company famously failed to do this after buying up HOTMail in 1996 and attempting to replace its Sun Solaris servers with PCs running NT; it similarly failed to smoothly transition WebTV from its original Sun-infrastructure to one based on Windows Server and WinCE clients in the late 90s. Microsoft also struggled to help Dell replace its WebObjects-based web store after Apple bought NeXT in 1997.
I truly enjoy reading about Microsoft’s failures. Thanks!!
I think just about everyone I know who has the Sidekick has lost all their data. Pictures, contacts… pretty pathetic Microsoft.
This is an excellent analysis piece from AppleInsider and a stunning indictment of Microsoft’s internal business practices.
Who would trust Microsoft enough to use now its Windows Azure platform now?
FTA “Pink was in fact a Zune-phone,” in that “Pink was a third group tasked with taking Zune software and making it a phone.”
And there’s the difference between MS and Apple. Apple designs a product as a whole thing/concept. MS takes something they have on the shelf and cobbles on another piece to ‘make it work’.
Dogfooding – what a great term and one that could only come out of Microsoft.
Let’s try to use it. If you assume that MS products are equivalent to dogfood, then when people use MS products they are “dogfooding.” Hence, when I use Excel on my Mac, I am dogfooding. Sounds about right.
I’d rather use the term, ‘cat litter’. Smells more!
M$ really needs to just fail.
A culture of “dogfooding” (to eradicate any vestiges of competitor’s technologies after an acquisition)… sounds just like the A–Hole who’s heading up Microsoft these days!
A company named “Danger”>
Microsoft never could take a hint.
It’s appalling that something like this can happen at a big technology company. Heads should roll for something like this. Of course, Apple isn’t perfect either, as all the people who upgraded to Snow Leopard and lost all of their data point out.
Dang, that was a scary article to read. Apple should immediately give spot bonuses to all of their Data Center and IT staff. Just sayin’….
As long as it takes.
Dogfooding doesn’t mean “to eradicate any vestiges of competitor’s technologies after an acquisition”. A company that uses it’s own products is “eating it’s own dog food”, or “dogfooding”. It’s a way to convey confidence in a product (tip of the hat to Wikipedia).
I don’t doubt that Microsoft supplanted Danger technology with it’s own, leading to the crash. That’s called stupidity, not dogfooding.
Dilger gives Mac users a bad name. He views everything as “Apple is right, therefore Microsoft is wrong”. He’s just as bad as those on the opposite side of the spectrum.
Wait…so the Sidekick service is still down? Holy crap…
The way that piece reads, you have to wonder if they’ll ever be able to get it back up and running, data loss or not. As in, will the sync service ever come back up even empty of users’ data? WTF is T-Mobile going to do if it doesn’t ever get restarted? Replace as many Sidekicks as they can?
Holy cow.
Appalled, you happen to have a link for that? That’s first I’ve heard of this.
Unless you are a M$ paid troll you should at least be able to post a credible link. Let’s see it.
“Dilger gives Mac users a bad name. He views everything as “Apple is right, therefore Microsoft is wrong”. He’s just as bad as those on the opposite side of the spectrum.”
Dilger is not perfect but he’s right a heck of a lot more often than he’s wrong. The technology press in general is an embarassment, and rite with conflicts of interest, sloppy reporting, stupidity, and quotes from Rob Enderle.
Daniel Eran Dilger is very fanboyish, but he does not always report Apple as right, but if you actually read his blog you’d know that. But not actually reading his blog didn’t stop you from commenting about it. That’s called “talking out of your ass”. In other words you’re doing what you claim he does.
Nice.
@twilightmoon
Look about 5 articles below this one and you’ll see the article. Ironic to see you commenting about fanboys when you pull out the age old fanboy attack of a M$ paid troll for anyone who posts anything that challenges your technolog choice.