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Microsoft Danger: Living Up To Its Name

Every computer user learns that it's vital to back up important files. They usually learn this lesson the moment after they lose a bunch of important files that they haven't backed up. That's just silly users though. Most large enterprises not only back up files, but have disaster recovery plans that allow them to continue business if their primary data centers are taken out. The key word there is most.

One incredible exception to that plan-for-disaster rule seems to be Danger, the company that makes the Sidekick mobile device. Microsoft purchased Danger in February 2008 for $500 million. Whatever that half-billion dollars was used for, it doesn't seem to have been used for backups. Last week saw an major outage due to extensive data loss. At this point, Danger and T-Mobile seem to think they have very little chance of recovering any data that isn't located on a customer's Sidekick. The data was in the cloud, and the cloud has burst.

Any $500 million acquisition usually comes with some technical due diligence. When Microsoft bought Danger, didn't they have someone take a look at how the company ran their servers? During the more than 18 months since the acquisition, didn't anyone review how Danger was operating? Given that they currently have a Java-heavy platform, it seems likely that Microsoft was in there looking at how they could showcase .NET for operations. During those discussion, you would think the question of data backup and redundancy would have come up.

Perhaps the folks at Danger were trying to give the world a subtle message with their name. Subtle isn't good though. If only the company could have gotten the totaldataloss.com domain, more Sidekick users would have known what they were in for.

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