Stories of Microsoft technical meltdown: T-Mobile Sidekick/Danger 'Hiphop', all data lost

[steve jenkin-2]

I found these two pieces sent by a friend, completely gob-smacking.
Thought I'd share my amazement with you all.

This saga ended up with a 7+ day service outage (for T-Mobile Sidekick
and possibly a Telstra service) and loss of all customer data.

There are dangers for commercial services run 'in the Cloud' by a
third-party. Sure there's an SLA, but what's it worth when you business
is gone?

BTW: For me, this makes the performance of Google & Android look
stunning (as in outstanding).


"Microsoft's Sidekick/Pink problems blamed on dogfooding and sabotage"

<http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/12/microsofts_sidekick_pink_problems_blamed_on_dogfooding_and_sabotage.html>



"Exclusive: Pink Danger leaks from Microsoft's Windows Phone"

<http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/09/exclusive_pink_danger_leaks_from_microsofts_windows_phone.html>

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[Alex Satrapa-5]

On 13/10/2009, at 16:21 , steve jenkin wrote:

> This saga ended up with a 7+ day service outage (for T-Mobile Sidekick
> and possibly a Telstra service) and loss of all customer data.

I can't believe that someone has turned "eating your own dogfood" into  
a pejorative.

Samba is a project built on the "eat your own dogfood" paradigm - it  
started off with one guy trying to share files with his wife's  
computer, and since then has been maintained by people who use it on a  
day to day basis for doing Real Work™.

As for the allegations of sabotage, I suggest it's unwise to attribute  
to malice what can be adequately explained through incompetence.  No  
backups, a botched up SAN upgrade - this is easily explained through  
incompetence.  Somewhere in Redmond, I expect a work experience kid is  
having an unexpected return to school ;)

> There are dangers for commercial services run 'in the Cloud' by a
> third-party. Sure there's an SLA, but what's it worth when you  
> business
> is gone?

Where do you keep your "off site" backups when you don't have a site?  
I would suggest that businesses intent on running "in the cloud"  
ensure that they have an "off cloud" backup (eg: backup to disk on a  
PC in the office).

> "Exclusive: Pink Danger leaks from Microsoft's Windows Phone"

One of the stories I've heard about Pink was that Microsoft designed  
the appearance of the phones, then sent the designs off to their  
technology partner to build a phone into the shell. This of course  
doesn't work when you're dealing with products that require antennas.  
I'm sure Jonathon Ives and co would advise Microsoft's industrial  
designers to start with the minimal hardware and build a product  
around it:

Fictional dialogue between engineering and design said:
> "hey design people, here is a chipset, here is an antenna.  There  
> are many antennae like it but this one is yours.  You must allow the  
> antenna to be on the side furthest away from the human's head.  The  
> gap between human and antenna must be at least 8mm.  The chipset  
> requires 20m by 40mm by 5mm.  The battery pack can be shaped to fit.  
> Go for it."


I have to wonder what's going on in Microsoft land.  I hope most of  
the stories I've heard about the Sidekick data loss and the Pink  
project's fail-by-design, are simply fiction conjured up by anti-
Microsoft zealots.

Regards
Alex

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[Hugh Fisher]

steve jenkin wrote:

> "Microsoft's Sidekick/Pink problems blamed on dogfooding and sabotage"
>
> <http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/12/microsofts_sidekick_pink_problems_blamed_on_dogfooding_and_sabotage.html>
>
>
> "Exclusive: Pink Danger leaks from Microsoft's Windows Phone"
>
> <http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/09/exclusive_pink_danger_leaks_from_microsofts_windows_phone.html>

Be warned: Daniel Eran Dilger has a reputation for exaggeration and
just making stuff up ... and that's within the Mac community, who
are a bunch of uncritical fanbois :-)

I'm enjoying the reports of the Microsoft/Sidekick disaster as much
as anyone, but most of them blame incompetence rather than sabotage.

        cheers,
        Hugh

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[steve jenkin-2]

Alex Satrapa wrote on 13/10/09 5:20 PM:

> I can't believe that someone has turned "eating your own dogfood" into a
> pejorative.

My reading is that 'dog fooding' means something very different to
Microsofties...
It is closer to NIH (Not Invented Here), and quite obsessive/aggressive
- and quite irrational.

To me it seems that Microsoft don't just 'eat their own dogfood', they
actively & aggressively remove any competitors software.

It's the technical equivalent/expression of their marketing stance:
  "kill/crush all opposition".

That's a rather different stance from the Samba team - who'd have to
refuse to run any Windows code/apps if they adopted the Microsoft "dog
food" stance. Sorta defeats the whole point of inter-operability.

It isn't accidental that outsiders have produced the most reliable &
compatible SMB implementation. (?proof?)

Quotes from 1st article:

"The sources point to long standing management issues, a culture of
"dogfooding" (to eradicate any vestiges of competitor's technologies
after an acquisition), ...

"To 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.

"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.


Quote from 2nd article (pg 3):

"This won't happen for three reasons:
1) Microsoft's irrational hatred of Java,
2) Microsoft's irrational love of Windows in all of its horrible
flavors, and
3) all the Danger folks who loved the Sidekick platform have left or
likely will leave soon, and Microsoft has no in-house expertise in Java
or the Danger platform.



> As for the allegations of sabotage, I suggest it's unwise to attribute
> to malice what can be adequately explained through incompetence.  No
> backups, a botched up SAN upgrade - this is easily explained through
> incompetence.  Somewhere in Redmond, I expect a work experience kid is
> having an unexpected return to school ;)

Agree.
Or a promotion into Marketing :-)


<snip>

> I have to wonder what's going on in Microsoft land.  I hope most of the
> stories I've heard about the Sidekick data loss and the Pink project's
> fail-by-design, are simply fiction conjured up by anti-Microsoft zealots.

They really could be this dysfunctional.
It makes the politics of Open Source look positively benign...

you've seen the "Monkey Boy" video of Ballmer on stage, haven't you?
Would you trust him with your savings (by buying shares in MS)?


> Regards
> Alex


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[Daniel Pittman]

steve jenkin <sjenkin@...> writes:
> Alex Satrapa wrote on 13/10/09 5:20 PM:
>
>> I can't believe that someone has turned "eating your own dogfood" into a
>> pejorative.
>
> My reading is that 'dog fooding' means something very different to
> Microsofties...  It is closer to NIH (Not Invented Here), and quite
> obsessive/aggressive - and quite irrational.

[...]

> Quotes from 1st article:
>
> "The sources point to long standing management issues, a culture of
> "dogfooding" (to eradicate any vestiges of competitor's technologies
> after an acquisition), ...

I disagree: this is the "eat your own dogfood" model, taken to the logical
endpoint for a company that is big enough to buy the competition:

You don't just hang on to the, say, Oracle box: you replace it with your own
DBMS, so that your tools work on your own platform.

Then, when that shows you why the new acquisition purchased Oracle you fix
it.  (Ideally, before it hurts the customer, but whatever.)


This isn't really any different to using your own product for new development
in-house, other than the potentially increased risk of customer-visible
problems.

        Daniel
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[Paul Wayper]

On 13/10/09 18:10, Daniel Pittman wrote:
> I disagree: this is the "eat your own dogfood" model, taken to the logical
> endpoint for a company that is big enough to buy the competition:
>
> You don't just hang on to the, say, Oracle box: you replace it with your own
> DBMS, so that your tools work on your own platform.

See, the funny thing here is that normally the reason for "eating your own
dogfood" with software is to test it, to get feedback and to improve it.  This
works best when the people using the software are also its programmers; it
works badly when the people using it have no control over the software at all
and are treated as customers (or, worse, rival factions) in the development
process.

Guess what happens at Microsoft?  Yep, lots of internal politics, lots of code
and political separation, and - worst of all for improving the software -
resource accountability means that even if you did have access to the code for
WinCE, and the knowledge to fix the bug you've just found, you wouldn't be
allowed to fix it because you couldn't charge your time to the right cost
centre and no middle manager is going to allow her budget to pay for someone
else's improvements.

And I note with wry amusement that AppleInsider doesn't put Maemo or Moblin on
its timeline...

This isn't the failure of "the cloud" per se, it's just a failure in who you
trust.  "The Cloud" can be basically treated as a big data center - albeit one
that you can't drive up to and pick up all your servers from when they go
bust.  You look at the services they provide and what they charge, and decide
what you can afford from there.

Have fun,

Paul
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[Alex Satrapa-5]

On 13/10/2009, at 17:44 , steve jenkin wrote:

> My reading is that 'dog fooding' means something very different to
> Microsofties... [screed]

That's what I was getting at: they've taken "eat your own dogfood" and  
turned it from a good thing (use your own product to do the parts of  
your job you wrote it to do) into a perjorative (take the good stuff  
you've gotten from companies you've bought out and turn it into a  
dog's breakfast).

For me, "dogfooding" would imply that one is focussing on improving  
one's software by using it even when it hurts. As opposed to this NIH-
perverted idea of forcibly removing someone else's intellectual  
capital from the company before we have anything to fill the hole.

Thankfully they still produce the Microsoft Ergonomic Natural Keyboard  
4000. Best keyboard ever. The good karma from that is starting to run  
low though.

Alex

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