Sidekick outage: How can Microsoft save face?
T-Mobile has made it clear that the server outage which caused thousands of Sidekick smartphone customers to lose their personal data wasn’t its fault – it was Microsoft’s.
Many industry experts have speculated the cause. Was Microsoft attempting to update the servers that handle its subsidiary Danger’s Sidekick data storage, without properly backing them up? Did a server overheat, leading to a domino effect that toppled not just the main servers, but also their backups?
Microsoft has not yet provided an official cause. A spokesperson said Monday the company is still investigating.
The software superpower, however, has said the technology on which Danger’s cloud services are based is “totally separate” from that which powers Microsoft’s other cloud-computing platforms, such as Windows Azure and Office Web Apps. “Danger, as a Microsoft subsidiary, created and continues to operate the Sidekick service,” a Microsoft spokesperson told seattlepi.com.
The Sidekick server outage, the magnitude of which many experts said is unprecedented, has cast much doubt on Microsoft’s ability to offer reliable cloud services.
“If you can’t trust Microsoft, who else can you trust?” said Azita Arvani, founder of the Arvani Group and a mobile-industry analyst.
Last week’s outage, and the events that followed, have put “a huge black eye on the cloud-computing services, in general,” Arvani said. At a time when companies – not just Microsoft, but also Google, Amazon, SalesForce, IBM and others – are pushing cloud computingas a less expensive solution for enterprise data storage, the Sidekick controversy is a big setback.
So what does Microsoft need to do in the next few days to mitigate the problem and extinguish this reignited skepticism of cloud services?
“Microsoft needs to, within 24 hours, be able to message why this cloud computing operation is different than the one they are marketing to other businesses,” Matt Eventoff, a Princeton, N.J., communications consultant, said in an e-mail, “because in three weeks everyone will forget that this was a purchased product (Microsoft bought Danger).
“This window to explain this properly is closing fast.”
In the Sidekick case, Microsoft failed to provide what Lew Smith, of the IT consultancy firm Interphase Systems, called the three main elements of successful cloud services: stability, reliability and disaster recovery….
…Meanwhile, a big portion of T-Mobile’s business has been halted. The Bellevue-based company temporarily stopped selling Sidekick smartphones, spokeswoman Cara Walker said, both online and in retail stores.
T-Mobile planned to give an update of the situation Monday, but hadn’t yet at the time of this post.
“T-Mobile and Microsoft have not done a great job of communicating through this crisis, and therein really lay the issue,” Eventoff wrote. “Cloud computing is a relatively new concept to the masses (me included) and when something is new, people a) are intrigued b) can be intimidated and c) tend to choose the safer alternative until the new concept has been vetted.”
“This issue is that this isn’t about someone’s $300 Sidekick anymore,” he added. “Now it may (be) about a multimillion-dollar cloud-computing contract.”
