Succinctly Speaking With Steve Ballmer: Sidekick Fiasco “Not Good”
by John Paczkowski
Posted on October 20, 2009 at 12:07 PM PT
T-Mobile Sidekick users who lost their personal data in a humiliating server failure at Microsoft subsidiary Danger last week are today restoring their contact lists–but not much else. With a tool provided on T-Mobile’s Web site, subscribers can view and restore their contacts as of Oct. 1. This is apparently the first phase of a multistep restoration process that Microsoft promises will eventually include photographs, notes, to-do lists, marketplace data and high scores.
Again, nice to hear this talk of a full data restoration after T-Mobile’s warning that all personal data had been permanently lost. Clearly, Microsoft (MSFT) is doing everything in its power to remedy the issue, which has led many to question the company’s protocols for redundancy and server failure, and beyond these, whether the software giant can even be trusted to safeguard user data. As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Network World, the Sidekick fiasco was “not good.”
“It is something we are going to have to address and explain to customers, our method and process and quality approach and what went wrong in that case and how we are making sure that it does not happen again,” Ballmer said. “Non-Sidekick users, we are not earning their trust back but I think people are going to say, ‘Hey, look, show me what you are doing to insure this does not happen to me.’”
Comments
The problem for Microsoft is they already had the reputation for the absolute lowest quality and reliability before they screwed up the Sidekick back-end. People are looking for signs that some improvement is taking place, and instead we see them falling all over themselves and losing data, reinforcing the fact that there is something critically wrong there.
Their bad reputation also includes customer hostility, lack of follow-through on commitments, and prioritizing monopoly maintenance over technology, and we see all that in this Sidekick incident, plain as day.
So this incident is typical behavior, not atypical. It’s like when the town drunk crashes his car into a tree: nobody but nobody is going to believe he wasn’t hammered at the time.
Good luck to Microsoft’s customers and investors. You are going to need it.
Posted by Fred Hamranhansenhansen at October 20th, 2009 at 6:17 pm