Small business

Don't Blame “The Cloud” or SaaS for Microsoft and Sidekick Stupidity

Bad management gives SaaS a black eye

1 comment | 3I like it!
October 12, 2009, 10:53 AM — 

By now, you probably heard about poor Sidekick users who have lost their contacts, calendar entries, and other information due to a massive fail by T-Mobile's Sidekick division and the Microsoft subsidiary providing data services. People who hate “the cloud” or those selling local disk storage (often the same people) are cheering the loss because it seems to bolster their complaints about Software As A Service not being trustworthy. But a little digging shows the blame sits squarely on management stupidity, where you can usually find the root of all business problems.

First, Sidekick users who don't sync their data to their own PC were walking a tightrope. They fell, or rolled snake-eyes, or whatever you want to say to people who lost data because they didn't back up. But you can't really blame Sidekick users too much, because the sync process is painful and tedious, and the users understandably trusted their provider to follow proper data management practices.

Oops. Turns out Sidekick and T-Mobile trusted Danger, the provider now owned by Microsoft, to know how to handle data safely. You know, backup data on a regular basis. If not, at least backup data before upgrading the storage system holding all user information. Even the lowest level IT tech knows to backup a disk before upgrading that disk, because things often go wrong. When you have a backup, a mistake is an annoyance. When you don't, the mistake becomes news.

Every IT tech knows that running a system with a single point of failure will always bite you in the butt. Holding all the user data on one storage system is a single point of failure. Not having a backup for a service you're charging customers a monthly fee is darn near criminally negligent.

Is “the cloud” to blame for this mess? No. Danger, the provider owned by Microsoft, gets the blame. The techs working on the storage system without verifying a good backup are to blame. T-Mobile, banking all the money from all their Sidekick subscribers each month, is to blame. The cloud and SaaS are blameless, let down by poor management.

As always, management stupidity is to blame. As always, managers will escape to screw up again, and a few low-level IT techs will be fired so the company can say they took action. That's when you really see corporate management kick into high gear: when they blame someone else for their own stupidity.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

I like it!
Comments

EXACTLY!

Been having this debate in another forum where it was suggested that if the techs had better software "checking" in place this never would have happened; wrong.

Some collective group of idiots overrode common sense practices and took action where prudence (check the backups, NEVER work on a production system, test that crap first) was warranted. And it was probably driven by the need to showcase a big money product rollout (on M$ part) and a lack of understanding (probably no understanding) of the consequences of failure (T-Mobile TECHNICAL management being overridden by business desires; typical).

You've hit the nail squarely on the head (in terms of blame and consequences).
| reply
peer-to-peer

Esther Schindler
If the comments are ugly, the code is ugly

claird
SVG a graphics format for 21st century

pasmith
Take Chrome OS for a test spin

Sandra Henry-Stocker
Solaris Tip: Have Your Files Changed Since Installation?

sjvn
64-bits of protection?

jfruh
Android fragments vs. the iPhone monolith

mikelgan
What Gizmodo missed about the Pro WX Wireless USB disk drive

 

Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325

Join the conversation here

The Daily Tip

The Daily TipQuick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.

Hot tips:

Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.

Newsletters

Subscribe to ITWORLD TODAY and receive the latest IT news and analysis.

I would like to receive offers via email from ITworld partners.
By clicking submit you agree to the terms and conditions outlined in ITworld's privacy policy.
Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace