“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.
Appalling is referring to this:
“Apple aware of ‘rare’ Snow Leopard data-threatening bug, plans patch”
It truly is if you distort the facts.
Wow, this looks like it is nothing short of the brilliant work of Ballmer at the helm.
I just love the idea of the lawsuits that could emerge from this, the carnage into MS deep pockets will be great entertainment, not to mention how the mainstream media just might jump into this.
The zunophone, what a laugh.
@scott
In all fairness, Dilger rightly describes the use of the term “dogfooding” in his article:
“Striving to rid the company of foreign technology and “eat one’s own dog food” instead is so common that Microsoft’s employees are said to commonly use the word “dogfooding” as a verb to describe this.”
I mean, if a company develops a new product using its own technologies it could be called ‘dogfooding’ in a positive sense. But when a company acquires a company with successful technology, and tries to supplant that companies IP with its own, that is ‘dogfooding’ to its detriment. Also, remember that article writers often do not write the headlines. Microsoft, as the article points out, has a history of acquiring successful companies and then killing the technology that made them successful, soley to maintain often inferior MS technologies. It appears that is what happened here, if you believe the reporting.
So, is there a possibility that the Sidekick data loss was intentional and caused by sabotage?
Any suspects?
Who has motives do this and how would they benefit?
Is there an investigation under way?
Not sure if it’s related but Steve Ballmer was seen running with scissors through the server farm . . .
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.
The idea that the service is not just down but irretrievably lost points to sabotage. For instance, with a properly configured SAN, and Oracle Log files it should be possible to randomly throw circuit breakers and still restore the system with all (99.9%) the data.
Ask Oracle for a demonstration.