~ AppleInsider | Microsoft’s Sidekick/Pink problems blamed on dogfooding and sabotageTo the engineers familiar with Microsoft’s internal operations who spoke with us, that suggests two possible scenarios. First, that Microsoft decided to suddenly replace Danger’s existing infrastructure with its own, and simply failed to carry this out. Danger’s existing system to support Sidekick users was built using an Oracle Real Application Cluster, storing its data in a SAN (storage area network) so that the information would be available to a cluster of high availability servers. This approach is expressly designed to be resilient to hardware failure.
Microsoft is well known for wanting to replace competitor’s technologies with its own. The company famously failed to do this after buying up HoTMaiL in 1996 and attempting to replace its Sun Solaris servers with PCs running NT; it similarly failed to smoothly transition WebTV from its original Sun-infrastructure to one based on Windows Server and WinCE clients in the late 90s. Microsoft also struggled to help Dell replace its WebObjects-based web store after Apple bought NeXT in 1997. Striving to rid the company of foreign technology and “eat one’s own dog food” instead is so common that Microsoft’s employees are said to commonly use the word “dogfooding” as a verb to describe this.
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Since the failure, T-Mobile has been warning its Sidekick customers “during this service disruption, please DO NOT remove your battery, reset your Sidekick, or allow it to lose power.” The reason for this relates to how the Sidekick interacts with the Danger cloud services Microsoft was running.
“On the iPhone, you sync your data with your PC/Mac via iTunes, and MobileMe in parallel syncs both the iPhone and the PC/Mac with ‘the cloud” [at MobileMe]. If the cloud were to go down and everything lost (like I said, an almost completely inconceivable occurrence except by deliberate sabotage), your data would still be preserved on both your iPhone and your PC/Mac,” a source explained.
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way on the Sidekick. The Sidekick was designed under the assumption that the cloud would always be available, and that your data would be safe there, so the device doesn’t try very hard to preserve your data if you were to yank the battery or in the rare event of a phone OS crash/reboot. Instead, under these circumstances the device starts from an empty database and then reloads all of your data from the service when it comes back up.
“That’s why T-Mobile has been telling everyone not to pull the batteries on their Sidekicks or let them run down. It is safe to turn the device off and on with the power button, and it should also shut down cleanly if the battery runs down, but once again, if it fails to shut down cleanly, it starts over from an empty database on the next reboot.
