Microsoft Offers Mea Culpa For Sidekick Outage

Microsoft says it's sorry for the outage, but to a still-seething base of about one million Sidekick users, some of whom have already filed class action suits against the company, the apology isn't going to have much effect. And to T-Mobile, which earlier this week had to stop selling the Sidekick due to an outage that wasn't its fault, the apology isn't going to bring back lost business.

In a letter to Sidekick users, Roz Ho, corporate vice president and head of Microsoft's Premium Mobile Experiences (PMX) division, said Microsoft will begin restoring Sidekick users' lost data "as soon as possible," starting with personal contacts, and followed by calendar entries, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores."

Microsoft figured out that the outage "was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up," and restored the data by rebuilding the system "component by component," according to Ho. To avoid a repeat, Microsoft has instituted a more resilient backup process that improves the stability of the Sidekick service and maintains the integrity of its backup databases, Ho said.

Now that the Sidekick glitch is fixed, Ho must now confront the growing realization among Sidekick users that Microsoft has no intention of continuing to develop future versions of the Sidekick. While this wouldn't come as a huge surprise to Sidekick fans, Microsoft's inability to develop a successor to the Sidekick could end up being a major PR disaster for the company.

According to one source close to Microsoft, the Pink smartphone project was supposed to build on the Sidekick's success with a software and services stack unique from that of devices on the market today, but has instead been plagued by inexperienced management with virtually no experience in delivering such a device. As things stand now, Pink has little chance of ever being released and could soon be scuttled, the source said.

Meanwhile, as Pink's struggles have intensified, Microsoft has been moving more PMX team members onto the project, leaving only a skeleton crew to run the Sidekick service, the source told Channelweb.com earlier this week. "This outage was the result of PMX pulling Danger people off of Sidekick and putting them on Pink," said the source, who requested anonymity.

Microsoft last year paid $500 million for Danger, developer of the Sidekick, to help build Pink, but has since laid off many of its employees and seen a significant number of others leave the company of their own accord. Disenchantment among the Danger staffers that remain with Microsoft has grown so strong that some reports have suggested the Sidekick outage may have been a deliberate act of sabotage.

Microsoft hasn't confirmed that Pink even exists, nor is it willing to comment on the future of the Sidekick. In a statement earlier this week, Microsoft said only that it "will continue to deliver premium mobile experiences for consumers." With no clear future for the Sidekick, and a Pink project that appears to be going nowhere, what are Microsoft's plans for the one million or so current Sidekick users?

Microsoft has been raked over the coals for allowing Windows Mobile to fall so far behind the competition, but the Sidekick situation poses a similar threat to its reputation, particularly as Microsoft moves into the realm of cloud computing. Although it's debatable whether the Sidekick outage was a cloud computing failure, Microsoft definitely doesn't want to be painted as a company that's unable to meet its service obligations to customers.

That's probably why PMX's Ho on Thursday gamely attempted to assure Sidekick users that Microsoft appreciates both their business and their enthusiasm for the Sidekick device.

"We are eager to deliver the level of reliable service that our incredibly loyal customers have become accustomed to, and we are taking immediate steps to help ensure this does not happen again," Ho said in the letter.