10.13.09
Did Microsoft Kill Danger?
Summary: Sidekick gets taken off the shelves after Microsoft’s major disaster that exterminated many people’s personal data
THE PRESS currently covers rather extensively Microsoft's disaster with Danger/T-Mobile. It is the latest case of Microsoft failing to sell appliances (hardware), piled on top of disasters like the Xbox 360, whose imminent death is earning some cartoons.
Xbox will never recover those billions of dollars in losses and Sidekick too — as we noted on Sunday — has been stained to the point where not many carriers/shops would wish to stock it. In another blow to Microsoft, T-Mobile stops selling the Sidekick; instead, it is offering high-priced vouchers to victims. This only ever happens when there is a huge public relations disaster and fear (when a class action lawsuit seems inevitable).
US carrier T-Mobile has halted sales of the Sidekick cellphone after a server caused customers to lose personal data.
Microsoft subsidiary Danger, which designed Sidekick’s software and service, confirmed the disruption.
The only good thing (for Microsoft) is that people blame “the cloud”, which may prove harmful also to Microsoft’s competitors, principally Google. How did Microsoft allow such a failure,” asks Masnick. Well, look no further than the London Stock Exchange, which crashed repeatedly [1, 2, 3, 4] before dumping Windows for GNU/Linux. █
