Slightly better news for anyone who lost data during the recent Microsoft/T-Mobile Sidekick outage. While it initially appeared that user data may have been lost forever, T-Mobile issued a statement late yesterday saying, “Recent efforts indicate the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible.”
It goes on to say, “In the event certain customers have experienced a significant and permanent loss of personal content, T-Mobile will be sending these customers a $100 customer appreciation card. This will be in addition to the free month of data service that already went to Sidekick data customers.”
The card can be used for T-Mobile products and services. The company has temporarily stopped selling Sidekick devices and has advised current owners to not allow their Sidekicks to reset or lose power.
[via CNET]
I have an update from my sources-
My sources say that the primary reason for this big issue is the attitude new MSFT management had towards Danger when they acquired Danger.
The Pink leadership always thought that Sidekick is a competitor to Pink. The decision was made to shutdown Sidekick before Pink launch.
1. All the developers were removed from the Dev team and put on “Pink”.
2. The Ops staff was fired or moved under Global Foundation services group instead of under the GM.
3. The Ops were told to cut costs wherever possible. That included new equipment and supervision.
4. A project to move photos out of DB was stopped. This resulted in DB too large to take routine backups.
5. A project to split single large DB to smaller Pods was killed. That resulted in all eggs in one basket.
6. The total Danger dev team (even contractors) was reduced to 4-5 people in Ukrain. Even some of those are also moved recently to Pink.
7. All internal folks were told by Rz that Danger business is DONE.
8. Everyone was TOLD that Pink is going to be the best thing and get behind it.
SO, now embrace yourself you Sidekick folks till March 2010 and buy Pink phones from Vzw.
Hahahahah to T Mobile…….
Danger’s data(most of it) is already on the device. So a resync back to the service would work as long as users did not pull battery or hard reset.
PINK is a personal love of Roz”Houndstooth” Ho- a neophyte exec trying to prove something to the old, white men of Microsoft. She’s basically a talentless,equal opportunity token.
She lied to the Danger executive staff, who had no clue about the pre-existing work on PINK done by the airheads at Frog Design. Acquiring Danger was just for bodycount and some critical IP.
At some point, Danger’s/TMobile’s future intentions were reviewed by the PMX execs. Obviously reality is not as much fun as Science Fiction(Pink had 3d animations,Seadragon,Surface and a phaser beam) and Danger’s 3g project was put on low priority because it was buildable in the 21st century only.
The PINK staff, which had zero experience releasing a mobile product(or any product) ridiculed the Danger product,platform and T-Mobile ceaselessly. PMX leaked critical reviews of the Danger staff and product on MSFT sharenet for people to accidentally stumble upon.