Some Sidekick data might be recoverable

T-MOBILE HAS SAID that some of the phone numbers, photographs and other data that its customers using Sidekick phones lost as a result of the failure of a Microsoft computer system might be recoverable.

While Microsoft initially warned that all the data might have been lost forever, T-Mobile said it is more optimistic that most of its subscribers' data can be recovered.

There are about one million Sidekick users, but not all of them have lost data.

Anyone who loses their data will get a $100 credit from T-Mobile, which must be hoping that will mollify its customers enough that most of them won't decide to sue it for their losses.

A Microsoft spokeswoman, Brandy Bishop, said that the Vole's engineers "have been working 24 hours a day" trying to figure out how to restore the data.

However Apple Insider has put together an interesting and mostly plausible story claiming that the failure was the result of monumentally dysfunctional Microsoft mismanagement over recent years, possibly capped by a deliberate act of sabotage.

The story claims that the problems built up from a time before the Vole identified Danger as a viable acquisition target, and that it proceeded to make a series of catastrophic blunders.

According to a deep throat in Microsoft's Pink Project, there was a Pink group that existed prior to the Danger acquisition and was supposed to develop the Zune music player into a Windows Mobile phone.

When the Vole bought Danger for the Pink Project it suddently discovered that Danger had unbreakable contractual obligations to T-Mobile's Sidekick and the outfit's engineers could not be reassigned to developing Microsoft's wished-for Iphone killer.

The Vole tried to cancel the Sidekick contract but T-Mobile told it to go forth and multiply, so it was left trying to work out how to get a lot of sophisticated, unfamiliar technology right for a project it had not planned for and did not have adequate technical resources to pursue.

Without competent designers and systems engineers to guide them, some managers in over their heads apparently ran amok for some time, making a number of laughably tragic design decisions.

Apple Insider claims Microsoft management that was "clueless" about the Danger technology for Sidekick orchestrated a thorough-going failure of its cloud services development through a series of spectacularly bone-headed decisions.

The story points out that Microsoft acquired in Danger a resilient technology infrastructure including an Oracle Application Cluster of high availability servers that stored its data on a redundant storage area network (SAN).

It posits that the Vole might have attempted to migrate to its own technology, as it famously tried to do previously after it acquired Hotmail and WebTV, in both instances with disastrous results. Microsoft calls this disdain for competitors' systems "eating its own dog food", and the practice is apparently so prevalent that employees regularly use the word "dogfooding" as a verb to describe discarding any technology not invented there.

But whether it dismantled the Danger systems it inherited or attempted a too rapid transition to something else, that doesn't explain how Microsoft managed to so completely destroy Danger's infrastructure, including redundant data stores, log files, and multiple levels of data backups.

As the story explains, Microsoft does have a few competent engineers who would never rush headlong into such a systems migration without planning, testing, backups and measures in place to abort safely if needed.

It argues that the fact that Microsoft might be unable to salvage any user data from backups suggests that internal sabotage might have been involved. However the story seems to be a bit short on explaining a motive or offering evidence to indicate that sabotage was involved.

The source does suggest, however, that a disgruntled employee might have been responsible, as that would explain why all the data was wiped so thoroughly that it could be unrecoverable.

An act of sabotage would also explain why neither T-Mobile not Microsoft is releasing any more details, because there might be an investigation under way.

But now that Microsoft seems to have found a way of recovering most of the data, if T-Mobile is to be believed, a scenario involving sabotage appears less likely.

No matter what happened, this is going to hurt Microsoft. The Vole is trying to push cloud computing and even if this crash was not based on its systems software, it has dealt Microsoft's ambitions in this area a body blow. While Microsoft might not mind too much losing the Sidekick business, it cannot be happy at the damage this is sure to inflict on its cloud based plans.

T-Mobile's Service Level Agreement with Danger and Microsoft practically guarantees that a nasty lawsuit will ensue, regardless of whatever any investigation might turn up eventually.

All up it is looking like a total cock-up by Microsoft that's sure to cost it dearly in terms of a lot of money, its reputation, and its future cloud computing marketing efforts. µ