The Microsoft Sidekick phone, which sports address book, photo storage, password, and to-do list services, became a member of Amnesiacs International today when a server crash caused every phone in every market to lose all of its data. Permanently. The phones are made by a MS subsidiary, aptly named Danger, and sold through T-Mobile, who is offering the princely sum of $20 for the inconvenience caused by this loss of mobile memory and function.
Microsoft is suitably apologetic, and their engineers are working feverishly trying to restore at least a few bits of the missing data, but I can't help thinking that this was a conspiracy on par with Roswell and the Kennedy assassination.
Everyone knows that Microsoft hates cloud computing; it's very existence decries the end of the licensed software model upon which Microsoft rests its gigantic carcass. And there is no doubt that this "outage" is causing many to reconsider hosting their data offsite and on the Net. And Microsoft has shown multiple ethical lapses in the past (antitrust violations and patent infringement, to name a two major areas). And doesn't Microsoft know about backing up data? After all, they built Windows.
At this point, the only thing I don't suspect Microsoft's involvement in is with the Unabomber - that's because he wrote everything with paper, pen and ink.
