Paris Hilton must be breathing a sigh of relief.
Losing control of all the personal stuff on her Sidekick once was bad enough, without the threat that Microsoft would then just swallow it all. So for all the users of the “hiptop” device, the news on Thursday that the software company believes it can recover “most, if not all” of the data that was thought to have been lost after a data centre failure will come as a big relief.
It leaves some uncomfortable questions for Microsoft, though.
Such as: Why did it take nearly two weeks to work out that that most of the data hadn’t been lost after all? And: How did the company let this issue spiral into a public relations disaster, casting a shadow over two of its most important initiatives: mobile and cloud computing?
This is what Microsoft has to say about the recovery:
We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data.
It’s a bit late to reassure customers about this painstaking process when they’d been left pretty much in the dark for so long, and actually encouraged to believe their information had been lost.
With Microsoft providing little information, partner T-Mobile stepped into the vacuum nearly a week ago to tell Sidekick users that their data “almost certainly has been lost” and the chances of recovery were “extremely low.” Imagine how the Microsoft engineers working on the recovery felt when they read that one.
In an apology to its customers, Microsoft now promises it has “initiated a more resilient backup process.”
The message is signed by Roz Ho, corporate vice president, Premium Mobile Experiences. No kidding.
