United breaks guitars? Microsoft erases customer data...

Vaporware is exactly Microsoft’s core competency as a company.

Money quote from Dan Dilger's post on the ongoing Sidekick data-loss failure, and Microsoft's part in it. Datacenter failures happen, but a datacenter failure isn't the reason why Microsoft still hasn't been able to demonstrably recover any Sidekick user data.

Turns out the reason Microsoft hasn't been able to recover the data is the same as the data was lost in the first place: Microsoft managers, over the objections of Danger engineers, cancelled a pre-SAN-upgrade backup, two days into a six-day backup, because they didn't want to take the time to do it and Hitachi had assured them the backup was "safe". But Microsoft's servers have room for only one backup. So to START the new backup— the one they cancelled two days in — they had to delete the old one. So when the "safe" upgrade failed, there was no backup of the data.

Microsoft has been frantically trying to blame Hitachi, EMC, Sun, Oracle ... anyone but themselves. But the fact is, regardless of the cause of the failed SAN firmware update — which could be a Hitachi/EMC failure, but since no-one else has reported problems with it, is more likely a procedural error at Microsoft — the loss of the Sidekick data is because Microsoft erased its backup of the data, then couldn't be bothered to wait for a new one to complete. After all, it's only user data, right? So much for the safety of the cloud.

Now Microsoft is promising that they have, like, nearly all of most of some of the Sidekick user data recovered, well, nearly recovered, or at least, it'll be nearly recovered soon. Some of it. Maybe. They promised that they'd soon have ... a status update.  Any time now!

Dan Dilger suggests that the "recovered data" will turn out to be one more piece of vapor that Microsoft will turn its back on and walk away from once people's attention has been distracted elsewhere, and that if Microsoft does somehow manage to recover any significant fraction of the Sidekick user data, it'll be not so much due to any technical ability in Microsoft's part as a testament to the resilience of the underlying Sun/EMC/Oracle platform the Danger unit runs on.

I think he's probably on the mark. I predict a lawsuit from T-Mobile for failure to adhere to the Sidekick SLA, and I predict that Microsoft will, as quietly as it can, settle the suit and sweep it under the rug on conditions of non-disclosure, as it has so many times before.

(Article pointer via 7leaguebootdisk)

Sidkick data recovery updates ... maybe?

Microsoft announced today that it has managed to recover contact address-book information for Sidekick users, three weeks after Sidekick users lost access to their data ... and is already starting to spin it as "a minority of customers" who lost data from their Sidekicks.

Now the question here is, minority of which customers?  Is Microsoft trying to claim that only some Sidekick users lost data when the entire Sidekick server back-end went down?  Or is Microsoft saying that Sidekick users are only a small minority of Microsoft's customers?

The devil is in the details.