LOS ANGELES--When Ray Ozzie penned his Internet Services Disruption memo back in 2005, he had a pretty good idea where the computing world was going. He just didn't know how Microsoft was going to get there.
While many are ready to write off Microsoft as an declining icon of computing's last generation, Ozzie sees Microsoft positioned to leapfrog some of the companies that tend to be thought of as the leaders of the cloud computing world--names like Amazon, Salesforce and Google.
Ray Ozzie on stage at PDC '09.
(Credit: Microsoft)"I will never, ever, utter the words 'mission accomplished' for obvious reasons," Ozzie said in an interview after his speech at the Professional Developers Conference. "But I'm really pleased with where things are."
It's been a tough journey, to be sure. But Ozzie says Microsoft has changed in ways he could not have imagined. In particular, Ozzie points to Windows Azure--Microsoft's operating system in the clouds. Rather than just offer a set of services to move today's computing programs to remote servers, Ozzie says Azure is designed to handle the applications of tomorrow.
"When we began developing Azure, we developed it more or less with a clean sheet of paper saying, 'What will the operating environment look like for the next 30 years?' Ozzie said. "If you look at VMware or (Amazon's) EC2, what it really is--and I mean to be saying this respectfully--but it's more or less a (virtual machine) hosting environment. It's not a transformational computing environment."
In a lengthy interview with CNET, Ozzie also talked about lessons Microsoft learned from the recent Sidekick outage as well as why people are wrong to count Microsoft out of the smartphone race.
Here is an edited transcript:
Question: From your perspective, where would you say Microsoft is in terms of making the kinds of shifts you talked about in 2005? What is different than you thought it might be?
Ozzie: You know, when I wrote the memo, I really didn't have a crisp plan in terms of how we're going to accomplish it. And I will never, ever, utter the words "mission accomplished" for obvious reasons. But I'm really pleased with where things are. I mean, I think we have a lot of software yet to deliver, but out at the end user perspective, the notion of Office being across phone, Web, and PC, kind of re-pivoting the experience around productivity as opposed to the device, I'm really happy about [that].
I thought users would be more ready for it by this point in time than I think people really are. I don't think in our minds yet we've yet found, quote unquote, the desktop for the Web in terms of our own personal stuff. It's kind of still scattered out there on the Web.
I didn't think that the cloud computing thing--the back-end side--would take off as much as it has. There wasn't as much about that in the memo, but at that same time, you'd probably be amused to see some of the PowerPoint decks that I was shopping around internally at the time with these big pictures of hydroelectric dams and all these things saying there's going to be this recentralization that happens at the back end of computing, but I didn't know how it was going to pan out.
You announced that Azure is going into production January 1. Is the code changing significantly between now and then, or is that just when the billing mechanisms kick in?
Ozzie: What happens is--and this is all just really difficult to explain to people--but we've rolled out big, new data centers. The community technology preview is on a certain sets of servers. Some of those people may or may not opt to become production customers. Getting their things migrated from one set of systems to the other, it's just internal logistics. So, no, the code doesn't change a whole lot, it's more operational processes. And we really don't want to start charging people until we at least have one billing cycle of knowing that everything is right.
You mentioned moving people from one set of servers to another and immediately I hear in the back of my head "Sidekick." Obviously, the architecture is totally different. But can you talk about what you took away from that [outage for the Sidekick device in October]? In one sense, it was a totally other part of the business, at the same time, it was sort of this early cloud service, and a pretty spectacular outage.
Ozzie: There are a lot of lessons to be learned. Let me just preface this by saying it's inappropriate for me to go deeply into it not just for legal aspects and things like that, but because they're T-Mobile's customers, not ours. T-Mobile is our customer. But let me just speak at the abstract level.
There are lessons to be learned in terms of how acquisitions are dealt with. I know that's a non-obvious conclusion, but basically when you're building your own services and when you're building services from scratch, you have a certain understanding because of the people who were involved in that or whatever--of how this thing relates to that thing. When you bring in a company, you tend to think of things differently. And so there were some lessons to be learned there. There were lessons that we didn't learn, (areas where) we know better and I'll just say we weren't using best practices in certain areas.
The biggest lesson is something that I shouldn't have had to learn, and I'll tell you why. In Groove, I took, for the time, a very contrarian view of, no, it's got to be all at the edge. Nothing at the center, it's all peer-to-peer distributed. Then we--and I mean including me--have kind of swung the pendulum to appliance-based computing that's Web-centric, where the truth is in the cloud, so to speak.
One of the fascinating things about the Sidekick recovery process was how wonderful it was that data is also on the devices, because when your confidence level drops in one copy of the data and you have another one, it's really handy. So knowing to treat peer computing and centralized computing are both good, they're both very, very good.
You talked about the cloud as being early days. And I'm curious, there are some folks that have been playing in the space for a while, you know, SalesForce and Amazon and even Google to an extent. What do you feel Microsoft is offering in the cloud that competitors aren't?
Ozzie: When we began developing Azure, we developed it more or less with a clean sheet of paper saying, "What will the operating environment look like for the next 30 years?" If the servers like Linux and Windows NT-based systems and Mac OS, if these are all based on things that were built when I was in school, what's the next one going to look like? That's the most significant advantage.
If you look at VMware or [Amazon's] EC2, what it really is--and I mean to be saying this respectfully--but it's more or less a [virtual machine] hosting environment. It's not a transformational computing environment. All programs in the future will be written in a way that there is no single point of failure. There's no one server that can die and take down the service. And unless you write your applications for a programming model that's inherently parallel, you don't get to that point. And so, yes, we support the same kind of mode that the EC2 or VMware will do where you can take a VM and put it up there, but the reality is you don't get the benefit of cloud unless you use this other thing.
You actually had to go back and add that in. One of the things you talked about today was to take a virtual machine and put it up on Azure.
Ozzie: That's a very good observation. Last year, we introduced, I guess I'll say [something that was] a little too far ahead and we had to back into the present. But I'm extremely pleased about [adding the virtual machine ability] because anytime someone starts playing with [Azure] and they start to get a taste for what it's really like, then you really say, oh, I get it. Now I know how to design the software for that next generation.
You talked about "three screens and a cloud" as a pretty consistent refrain for Microsoft. But we're still not hearing as much about some of those screens, particularly on the mobile side. You mentioned in the spring we're going to hear sort of about the next-generation platform?
Ozzie: Yeah.
A lot of people are saying, you know, Microsoft and the phone--it's been way too long, game over. Why is that not the case?
Ozzie: I think it makes for good copy to take an extreme position that someone is dead or alive or this or that. Yes, iPhone has a lot of momentum, unquestionably. But I think the phenomenon we're in right now is the app phone. And if you look at the depth of apps that are on these phones, they're not very deep. It's not like Office or AutoCAD, where there are just thousands of man years that have gone into developing these apps. They're relatively thin apps that are companions to some service.
And I think if you look at anyone who's building an app phone--whether it's Palm, Google with Android, RIM--ultimately, all the apps that people want will be on all the phones. They're relatively straight porting efforts. I think people are imagining some kind of a barrier to entry, at least from an app perspective that I don't believe is there.
The biggest barrier to entry is: is it a phone that people want to use? And is it a phone that carriers want to sell and people have to measure us based on what we produce. But I don't believe that there's an app barrier.
This year, it seems like you guys have made a conscious choice to focus on Azure and not on some of the more finished services that live one or two layers up. Are you still pursuing the sort of Live Mesh and the Live Platform layers?
Ozzie: Absolutely.
Live Mesh, as a specific case in point, after we got to a certain point in the beta, we said, okay, how are we going to get this to scale from instead of a million or two million people to hundreds of millions of people? So the team and the technology was put into Windows Live and so even though I'm not making a product announcement, when you look at the next version of the Live services that are downloaded to your desktop, I think you'll see the contribution that the Mesh technologies and the Live platform had to that.
In terms of high-level services, no, we're still concentrating [on them]. You know, we still have a very big focus on the Web apps. I think you probably won't hear a lot about that at PDC, but you'll hear some more about that as Office comes more into a broader beta.
Between Pinpoint and Windows Marketplace, Windows Mobile Marketplace, Zune Marketplace--you guys have a lot of marketplaces.
Ozzie: It'll be converging down to two, one for consumers and one for IT and developers. Yes, it's a big company, yes, we have many ways to sell, but ultimately, there should be one place for consumers to buy things online, you should have one shopping cart across this and that. That doesn't necessarily mean one [user interface] to the marketplace because when you're in Xbox, you want to see it through Xbox. When you're on a phone, you want to see it through the phone.
On the PC, I'm still not actually convinced what the right thing is. When you're on a PC, do you want to see the marketplace through the Web or through a client? You know, I can kind of see both. I mean, look at the Zune marketplace, people like being able to buy it through a media-oriented marketplace, but if you were buying apps, it's not really clear. But in any case, there's one marketplace back end that is syndicatable into multiple front ends for the consumer and for the enterprise/IT, and what we were talking about today was really the enterprise/IT one.
It struck me that today, a lot of the story about the cloud has been that it's great for load balancing, it's great for sort of having predictable investment in IT, but there hasn't been as much about what are the benefits when your app is running in the cloud. It sounds like the new project code-named Dallas could be an example of one of those things where you can build a type of application that you couldn't build on premise because you're using someone else's data.
Ozzie: It is the right way of thinking about it. What we're basically trying to say is by agreeing to get together in a certain way, by agreeing on certain guardrails on the road that we'll all drive on, there can be benefits. Right now, there are many pieces of public data, there are lots of commercial data providers and each one has a different kind of a licensing mechanism. Some license by developer, some license by customer, some license by individual user. There are just lots of different terms. And a lot of the big benefits in the data that's out there are what happens when you join them, when you bring them together. And I believe that there's going to be a lot of potential in this.
Will we see Microsoft be kind of one of those first and best customers, bringing a lot of its data and making it available ?
Ozzie: I think the biggest set of data that you'll see us take in many directions is maps. It's the most obvious from a consumer's perspective. You can layer upon it quite nicely. You can layer both apps and other forms of data on it quite nicely.
What are some of the things that people have developed on Azure? Are there any areas of types of applications that have particularly surprised you?
Ozzie: I'm not sure if you noticed some weeks ago, Qi Lu was at Web 2.0 and he announced this Twitter on Bing feature? That is on Azure. And it's one of the most fascinating stories in terms of agility.
A number of people from across the company looked at this thing and said, "Wow, if we had the Twitter fire hose, what could we do with it? Let's start experimenting." And this other lab said, "Oh, well I already know what to do, you actually have access to the fire hose? How could we ever get enough machines put together in time?"
And just in a matter of weeks, you know, this app just came together, people came together, and we had this thing live. And the number from the virtual machines that are processing the incoming feeds, it's fairly astounding. Since that time, other experiments involving 2,000 machines here, 3,000 machines there, are just popping up because people haven't conceptualized what would it be like to have that kind of resources at your disposal.
Are these the kinds of data feeds we're going to have in the future? I mean, Twitter, you have this tremendous data feed, but you can't take in everything, at least not over an extended period of time right now.
Ozzie: In late '05, I guess it was, when I wrote that last memo, I had a theme that I was kind of talking about internally about moving to the cloud experiences and the back end. These days, I'm basically asking people the question: What if everything was recorded, everything? You are recording in your pen there. Some phones have the capability now--or maybe they're just prototypes that we've got--but measure barometric pressure, measure temperature.
Obviously, there are accelerometers. If you can measure everything and you have this aggregated data, what can you then do with it? And I think just getting people to experiment with it will bring us to places that we haven't known before. People concentrate so much on the scary aspect of privacy related to advertising base uses of it, but there are other uses.
From a health perspective, there are many things that I could measure about myself that would be of value to me and no one else, but we still aren't building those apps. It's just too hard to gather all these things.
When you kind of look at where you are, what are the gates to getting where you want as fast as possible? Is it still a matter of evangelizing inside the company? How much is it still a challenge that Microsoft is such a big company that is divided into product teams responsible for the here and now? What are the things that are sort of the biggest gates?
Ozzie: I would say the biggest gate is the same gate it's been for several years, but it's trending in distinctly the right direction, which is prioritization. It's just simply there are a lot of opportunities, there are a lot of different directions that we could go. And left unchecked, every time you do something new, it causes more complexity.
One of the positive side effects, if you will, of the economic downturn is the fact that we've all been forced to make the hard choices.
T-Mobile USA said late Monday that it is resuming sales of the Sidekick after pulling it off the shelves in the wake of last month's massive outage.
The wireless carrier said that the Sidekick 2008 will now sell for as low as $49 with a two-year contract, while the Sidekick LX 2009 will be priced at $149 with a two-year contract.
T-Mobile Sidekick LX
(Credit: CNET)"T-Mobile is pleased to announce that Sidekick sales have resumed," the carrier said in a statement.
The company is still dealing with the aftermath of the outage, which left customers without access to their data for weeks. Most customers have now been able to get much of their data back, although photos are being e-mailed to customers rather than being restored to the device.
Although sales have resumed, the question is whether the device will ever be able to regain the confidence of consumers.
It's also an issue for Microsoft, whose Danger service powers the Sidekick. The software maker on Tuesday is expected to announce another key cloud-based effort, the final version of Windows Azure.
CHICAGO--On the outside, Microsoft's massive new data center resembles the other buildings in the industrial area.
Even the inside of the building doesn't look like that much. The ground floor looks like a large indoor parking lot filled with a few parked trailers.
It's what's inside those trailers, though, that is the key to Microsoft's cloud-computing efforts. Each of the shipping containers in the Chicago data center houses anywhere from 1,800 to 2,500 servers, each of which can be serving up e-mail, managing instant messages, or running applications for Microsoft's soon-to-be-launched cloud-based operating system--Windows Azure.
Upstairs, Microsoft has four traditional raised floor server rooms, each roughly 12,000 square feet and consuming, on average, 3 megawatts of power. It's all part of a data center that will eventually occupy 700,000 square feet, making it one of the world's largest.
"I think, I'm not 100 percent sure, but I think this could be the largest data center in the world," said Arne Josefsberg, general manager of infrastructure services for Microsoft's data center operations.
Even with only half the site ready for computers, the center has 30 megawatts of capacity--many times that found in a typical facility.
On a hot day, Microsoft would rely on 7.5 miles worth of chilled water piping to keep things cool, but general manager Kevin Timmons smiled as he walked in for the facility's grand opening in late September. It was around 55 degrees outside.
"When I stepped out, I said 'what good data center weather'," he said. "I knew the chillers were off."
Although Microsoft is open about many of the details of its data centers, there are others it likes to keep quiet, including the site's exact location, the names of its employees, and even which brand of servers fill its racks and containers.
The software maker also won't say exactly which services are running in each facility, but the many Bing posters inside the upstairs server rooms in Chicago offer a pretty good indication of what is going on there.
Microsoft originally intended to open the Chicago facility last year, but the company has slowed its data center pace some amid the weaker economy and an array of cutbacks companywide. Instead, the facility had its grand opening in late September.
Of Sidekick--and Azure
Within a month, though, Microsoft's data centers were attracting attention for a wholly different reason. A massive server failure at an older facility--one that Microsoft acquired as part of its Danger acquisition--left thousands of T-Mobile Sidekick owners without access to their data as part of an outage that is now stretching into its second month.
Although Sidekick uses an entirely different architecture, the failure represented a tangible example of the biggest fear of cloud computing--that one will wake up one day to find their data gone.
Microsoft is quick to highlight the differences between the Sidekick setup and what Microsoft is building in Chicago and elsewhere. "We write multiple replicas of user data to multiple devices so that the data is available in a situation where a single or multiple physical nodes may fail," Windows Azure general manager Doug Hauger said in a statement after the Sidekick failure.
As for Azure, Microsoft is expected to talk about its commercial launch at this month's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, including offering more details on how the system will provide its redundancy. Microsoft has already announced some new Azure details, noting last week that it will begin charging for Azure as of February 1.
Microsoft is still trying to figure out just how much capacity at Chicago and elsewhere it needs to assign for Azure.
"Azure is incredibly hard to forecast," said Josefsberg. "We're probably erring toward having a little more capacity than we need in the short term."
What is clear is that, over time, Microsoft will need even more capacity. That's what has Josefsberg returning to a custom "heat map" that figures out the best place to build data centers based on factors including cheapness, greenness, and availability of power, political climate, weather, networking capacity, and other factors. Choosing the right spot is critical, Microsoft executives say, noting that 70 percent of a data center's economics are determined before a company ever breaks ground.
Josefsberg said he already has the next spot picked out.
"We know exactly where it is going to be but I can't tell you right now," he said.
But Microsoft has indicated how the next generation of data center will improve upon the Chicago design.
Moving to containers allows Microsoft to bring in computing capacity as needed, but still requires the company to build the physical building, power and cooling systems well ahead of time. The company's next generation of data center will allow those things to be built in a modular fashion as well.
"The beauty of that is two-fold," Josefsberg said. "We commit less capital upfront and we can then accommodate the latest in technology along the way."
T-Mobile Sidekick LX
(Credit: CNET)Microsoft has begun the process of restoring data to Sidekick owners who have been without it since a massive outage began at the beginning of the month, the software giant said Tuesday.
In a statement, Microsoft said it has posted a tool to T-Mobile's Web site that allows Sidekick owners to restore their address book.
Although it initially feared that much data might be lost, Microsoft said last week that it expected to be able to recover most, if not all, of the information. However, the company also said that the process of bringing back the data will go beyond this week.
Here is the full statement:
The Danger/Microsoft team continues to work around the clock and has completed its latest round of rigorous tests. We are now ready to make the first phase of the content restoration process available to you, starting with personal contacts.This data restoration effort is only necessary for the minority of customers who lost data from their Sidekick devices.
Beginning today, log into the My T-Mobile website, where there will be a recovery tool to restore contacts you may have lost during the recent service outage. This tool will enable you to view the contacts you had on your device as of October 1. With a few clicks and a confirmation, you will be able to restore these contacts to your Sidekick. If you have recreated some of the same contacts on your Sidekick since October 1, you can choose to keep both sets of contacts, merge them, or just keep the set of contacts now on your device. You may also edit any partial or complete duplicates on your Sidekick after restoration.
We continue to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to restore your data. We're making solid progress on the next phase in this restoration process, including your photographs, notes, to-do lists, marketplace data and high scores.
We appreciate your ongoing patience.
Microsoft on Monday apologized for the length of time it is taking to restore missing data to T-Mobile Sidekicks. The company said it expects to begin restoring data this week, but added that bringing back all data will take longer than that.
T-Mobile Sidekick LX
(Credit: CNET)In a note on its Web site, Microsoft said that the reason for the delay is that the company wants to make sure that it doesn't risk messing up data as it restores information to users' phones.
"The Danger/Microsoft team is continuing to work around the clock on the data restoration proces," Microsoft said. "We apologize that this is taking so long, but we want to make sure we are doing everything possible to maintain the integrity of your data."
A significant number of Sidekick owners have been without their data since the beginning of the month, when Sidekick data service became interrupted amid a massive outage. At one point, Microsoft feared much of the data was lost, but the company said early last week that things were looking better and later added that it expected to be able to bring back most, if not all, of the data.
"We continue to make steady progress, and we hope to be able to begin restoring personal contacts for affected users this week, with the remainder of the content (photographs, notes, to-do-lists, marketplace data, and high scores) shortly thereafter," Microsoft said.
Although Microsoft has said it expects to recover most if not all lost data for Sidekick users, T-Mobile said on Thursday that new sales of the product remain on hold.
The carrier declined to say when--or if--Sidekick sales would resume.
(Credit:
CNET)
"We're pleased that Microsoft/Danger is continuing to make progress," T-Mobile vice president David Beigie said in a statement to CNET News. "T-Mobile's sole focus remains on helping Sidekick customers recover from this disruption."
Service for the device has been impaired for going on two weeks. Last Saturday, Microsoft, whose Danger subsidiary powers the Sidekick service, said it believed that any data that was not on users' devices might be permanently lost.
However, by Monday, Microsoft said it was more optimistic and early on Thursday Microsoft issued a letter to customers saying it expected to recover most, if not all, user data.
All models of the Sidekick have remained listed as "temporarily out of stock" on T-Mobile's Web site.
The T-Mobile Sidekick LX.
(Credit: CNET)When the T-Mobile Sidekick started having data problems two weeks ago, it was a big pain for nearly all of the company's roughly 800,000 subscribers. But it became particularly rough for the many deaf people who have been among the Sidekick's most loyal fan base.
"It was severely limiting and made me very dependent on others," Carla McCraw, a Web designer from San Antonio, Texas, said in an e-mail interview. "This loss of independence was very stressful on me."
McCraw said she relies on her Sidekick to manage everyday tasks, from keeping up with closures at her son's day care to whether soccer practice will be rained out.
"It was extremely frustrating, not being able to know, and my mother had to call the soccer coach and day care, making me feel extremely inadequate," she said. "I had to rely on the Internet through (alternative services such as) Yahoo and Facebook to let my friends know my Sidekick was down."
The good news, for both deaf and hearing users, is that Microsoft and T-Mobile appear to be making headway at restoring much of the data that, at one time, appeared gone permanently.
But even an outage can be a big deal for those that use the Sidekick as something of a communications lifeline.
Lisa Gault, a deaf Sidekick owner in Katy, Texas.
(Credit: Lisa Gault)"As the outage went on, I became concerned about how my deaf teenage son would be able to communicate in an emergency," Jamie Berke, an About.com guide based in the Washington metro area, said in an e-mail.
"I know he is not the only one," said Berke, who is also deaf. "The outage probably meant that thousands of deaf children who depend on their Sidekicks to communicate with parents were unable to communicate in the event of an emergency. Plus, I myself, would have been unable to communicate in an emergency."
The Sidekick became an early favorite in deaf circles because of its good keyboard, then-state-of-the-art instant-messaging abilities, and ability to connect to relay services. T-Mobile improved things further by adding a data-only option so that deaf users weren't paying for voice minutes they didn't use.
Because the Sidekick didn't evolve as fast as other smartphones, many users--deaf and hearing alike--moved to the BlackBerry and other devices. And after their recent experiences, many of the remaining Sidekick users in the deaf community have said they are considering jumping ship, once their T-Mobile contracts end.
Audio
Impact on the deaf
CNET News reporter Ina Fried tells
editor Leslie Katz why the Sidekick
troubles hit deaf customers so hard.
Download mp3 (1.44MB)
"I am going to look into Sprint's BlackBerry, which more and more deaf people are taking up, and have complimented, and (said) that it is a lot more reliable," McCraw said.
Lisa Gault, a deaf Sidekick owner in Katy, Texas, said she in an e-mail interview that she relies on the Sidekick as a means to stay in touch with her family.
"It's a way for the school to get a hold of me, if something were to occur with my son who is (not deaf)," Gault said.
Gault said that even short of an emergency, it is a problem not to get her e-mail for an extended period.
"It's annoying, as my friends think I'm ignoring them, when in reality, I didn't get the e-mails yet," Gault said. "It really put the deaf community at more of a disadvantage--more so than for hearing people, since we're so reliant on e-mail (devices) to keep in touch."
Deaf users sound off on Sidekick outage
Recent problems with the smartphone, long popular in the deaf community, leave many users frustrated and sizing up alternatives.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 15, 2009 4:00 AM PDT
Microsoft: We've recovered most Sidekick data
In a letter to customers, the software maker said that it thinks only a minority of customers will end up losing any data.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 15, 2009 1:00 AM PDT
Lawsuits filed over Sidekick outages
Various legal actions claim negligence on the part of Microsoft and T-Mobile led to the recent cell phone woes.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 14, 2009 4:04 PM PDT
Sidekick's lesson: We learn by failing
The Sidekick outage shows that management hasn't caught up with the cloud, not that network storage is unreliable.(Posted in Rafe's Radar by Rafe Needleman)
October 12, 2009 10:32 PM PDT
Unanswered questions loom large in Sidekick fiasco
Microsoft and Danger remain largely silent as to both what led to a massive data loss as well as what it plans to do to try to make things right, not to mention what this will all mean for the future of the device.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 12, 2009 4:39 PM PDT
T-Mobile says Sidekick data may yet return
The wireless carrier says "recent efforts indicate the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible." Those who suffer permanent data loss will get $100.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 12, 2009 6:01 PM PDT
T-Mobile halts sales of Sidekick
Amid a massive failure that led to data loss for owners of the the gadgets, the wireless carrier stops selling new devices online and at its stores.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 12, 2009 10:11 AM PDT
Sidekick users share their horror stories
In the wake of a massive data loss, tales of woe are coming in from those whose devices have suffered a wicked case of amnesia.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 12, 2009 9:29 AM PDT
Sidekick outage casts cloud over Microsoft
Although Microsoft inherited Danger's service, this week's massive failure could call into question the broader reliability of depending on keeping data in Redmond's cloud.(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 10, 2009 3:26 PM PDT
Missing Sidekick data may be gone for good
T-Mobile issues apology to users, saying whatever contacts, calendar info, and other data that are currently missing from their Sidekicks are likely to be lost forever.(Posted in Crave by Matt Hickey)
October 10, 2009 1:40 PM PDT
Major outage hits T-Mobile Sidekick users
Outage that began Friday knocked out data service. Microsoft, whose Danger subsidiary powers the Sidekick service, says it has restored service for "critical applications."(Posted in Beyond Binary by Ina Fried)
October 6, 2009 11:57 AM PDT
Microsoft said Thursday that it believes it has recovered most of the Sidekick data that it initially feared might have been permanently lost.
"We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage," corporate vice president Roz Ho said in a letter to customers."We plan to begin restoring users' personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible."
On Wednesday, at least two lawsuits were filed against Microsoft and T-Mobile over the Sidekick outages, which began at the beginning of the month with data service interruptions and have left many users without access to their address books.
Microsoft had said on Saturday that it believed all data that was not on users' phones was probably permanently lost. However, by Monday it was sounding more optimisitic it could recover the data.
Here's the full text of the letter:
Dear T-Mobile Sidekick customers,On behalf of Microsoft, I want to apologize for the recent problems with the Sidekick service and give you an update on the steps we have taken to resolve these problems.
We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users' personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.
We now believe that data loss affected a minority of Sidekick users. If your Sidekick account was among those affected, please continue to log into the T-Mobile Sidekick forum at http://www.t-mobile.com/sidekick for the latest updates about when data restoration will begin, and any steps you may need to take. We will work with T-Mobile to post the next update on data restoration timing no later than Saturday.
We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data. We will continue working closely with T-Mobile to restore user data as quickly as possible. We are eager to deliver the level of reliable service that our incredibly loyal customers have become accustomed to, and we are taking immediate steps to help ensure this does not happen again. Specifically, we have made changes to improve the overall stability of the Sidekick Service and initiated a more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of our database backups is maintained.
Once again, we apologize for this situation and the inconvenience that it has created. Please know that we are working all-out to resolve this situation and restore the reliability of the service.
Sincerely,
Roz Ho
Corporate Vice President
Premium Mobile Experiences, Microsoft Corporation
Update 10:10 a.m.: Amended letter to include Microsoft's final wording of letter, which said it believes it has recovered "most, if not all" data.
It was only a matter of time, but the T-Mobile Sidekick issue has now spilled over to the courthouse.
A number of lawsuits have been filed, including two filed in federal court in Northern California on Wednesday that allege both negligence and false claims on the part of Microsoft and T-Mobile.
T-Mobile Sidekick LX
(Credit: CNET)The suits come amid a massive outage of the service that powers the Sidekick, which has hampered data service since early this month and left many users without access to their calendars, address books, and other information. At one point, Microsoft and T-Mobile indicated that any data not yet recovered was probably lost permanently, however the companies said Monday that they were more optimistic about being able to bring back users' information.
One suit, filed on behalf of a Bakersfield, Calif., man "and all others similarly situated" charges that, among other things, Microsoft and Danger failed to use reasonable care in handling Sidekick owners data and that the Sidekick was falsely advertised. That suit seeks monetary damages as well as an order requiring the companies to fix the Sidekicks and service or offer a full refund.
"T-Mobile and its service providers ought to have been more careful the use of backup technology and policies to prevent such data loss" said Ira P. Rothken, an attorney working on that case. "We are hopeful that T-Mobile and the rest of the defendants will do the right thing, use this as an opportunity to redesign the system as a new standard for cloud computing storage, and provide full compensation for the data loss."
Another suit, filed on behalf of Maureen Thompson "and all others similarly situated" seeks unspecified damages for Thompson and others who have lost data as a result of the recent Sidekick problems.
According to her lawyer, Thompson owns a Sidekick used primarily by her daughter, an aspiring model, singer, and songwriter who used her Sidekick to store personal and business contacts, appointments, and even irreplaceable song lyrics not stored anywhere else. The lawyer said that Thompson bought the device "primarily because T-Mobile promised that any data would be protected and available no matter what happened to the phone."
"T-Mobile's initial efforts to reimburse Sidekick users are a step in the right direction, but fail to sufficiently compensate Sidekick users for this disastrous loss of data," Thompson attorney Jay Edelson said in a statement. "T-Mobile and Microsoft promised to safeguard the most important data their customers possess and then apparently failed to follow even the most basic data protection principles. What they did is unthinkable in this day and age."
In that lawsuit, Thompson's lawyers argue why the outage of the Sidekick was particularly devastating, noting the device's cloud-based architecture in which the primary copy of the data is stored, not on the devices, but on servers operated by Microsoft's Danger unit.
"Further complicating the data loss is the fact that Sidekicks, unlike iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones, are not designed to sync locally with a user's personal computer without additional software and hardware," the suit states. "This means that most users were not able to backup their data locally, but were encouraged and required to rely on Microsoft/Danger."
Microsoft declined to comment on the lawsuit, but, a representative said on Wednesday that the company is "obviously very sorry for the inconvenience that this situation has caused Sidekick users, and we are working around the clock in an effort to recover and restore the data for any affected users. While it is still too early to say for sure, we announced on Monday that our engineering teams were increasingly optimistic."
For its part, T-Mobile said in a statement that it "does not comment on pending litigation."
"We are focused on helping our Sidekick customers recover from this recent service disruption and are continuing to support Microsoft's ongoing efforts to address and resolve the Danger platform issues," the company said.
T-Mobile has halted sales of the Sidekick amid the ongoing issues.
