The Sidekick server meltdown should be a surprise to no one
There are more than a million Sidekick smartphones in the US, and a single set of servers keeps them all running. Well, last weekend, this set of servers collectively stepped on a rake. That's the only way to properly communicate what happened. It was thwacked across the face by a five-foot-long handle of white ash and it’s been lying motionless on the lawn ever since.
The ongoing drama is filled with so many heavy-handed lessons that you could cast Roma Downey in the role of the system administrator and call it an episode of “Touched By An Angel.”
AP
Lesson One: “If a certain product or service does things in a radically different way from every other competing product or service, and none of their competitors steal the idea, there’s probably a very good reason why.”
What set Sidekicks apart from the rest of the smartphones on the market was the device’s unique relationship with the user’s data. Personal photos, contacts, emails, et cetera don’t “live” on the handset. Instead, the data’s home is a set of faraway servers maintained by Danger, Inc., the company behind all Sidekick hardware and software and which was bought by Microsoft last year.
(A side-lesson: when starting a company, never choose a name that might appear savagely ironic at some future date.)
The servers push the data back down onto the device when needed. This was a bold new idea. People lose their phones all the time. If you leave your Sidekick on a bus, who cares? In fact, if the person who finds it decides not to give it back, the original owner can get copies of every email and every photo and every contact address he or she creates on the device and exact retribution ranging from calling the cops with a name and address to posting the weasel’s nude self-portraits on the ’net.
But even five or six years after the its introduction, the Sidekick is still the only smartphone that handles data that way. All other phones backup and sync to the user’s PC.
Ask yourself: Are all those other companies stupid? Or did Apple and Blackberry et al look at the idea carefully and conclude “Oh, man ... those guys are screwed!”
Danger’s concept was based on the idea that our God is a loving and just God who would never, ever cause those very very very important servers to fail. I can sort of understand that line of thought. What I can’t understand is how the people in charge of those servers would have performed a risky bit of maintenance without first ensuring that they have a functional backup of everybody’s personal data.
Alas, they went ahead without a backup. The servers died. When the servers died, the network died, and when the network died, many Sidekick users did what most people do when a piece of technology is mysteriously misbehaving: they reset the device.
Which was the worst thing they could have possibly done. The Sidekick interprets a system reset as a sign that something’s gone wrong. So when the phone is done rebooting, the first thing it does is contact the server to replace all the handset’s content. Result: a wipe of all of the phone’s data, with no way to restore it.
I once asked an engineer friend of mine why all airplanes look the same. Had aerospace engineers stopped innovating, I wondered?
“No, folks come up with radical new concepts all the time,” he said. “It’s just that when these Brilliant Ideas is actually built and tested, people usually die. Which sort of stifles everyone else’s urge to try something different.”
Lesson Two: “When your favorite tech product or service gets bought by a much larger company, it’s time to send the suit or dress you normally wear for panic-filled occasions to the dry cleaners. You’ll probably be needing it soon.”
Let’s say there’s this ramshackle but intensely cool century-old Addams Famly-style house at the end of your street. It’s been vacant for a decade and you’re thrilled when you see that someone’s bought it. Finally, it’ll get fixed up and improved and it’ll be around for a long time.
Two weeks later, it’s been bulldozed and the foundations of a new Eyeglass Hut are being poured. They new owners weren’t buying the house. They were buying the property.
That’s what happened when Microsoft bought Danger last year. The Sidekick got Starbucked. They wanted the company’s personnel and their intellectual property. Microsoft probably couldn’t have cared less about the Sidekick platform itself.
They telegraphed this disdain early on, which is why I believe the multiple reports that claim that the Sidekick’s server resources were being maintained on a shoestring staff and budget.
There are times when I don’t have the time or the money to upgrade my backup system ... and my office is a mere three terabyte, single-user environment. Expand that problem to a million users and the only surprise about last weekend’s events is that the server crash wasn’t as dramatic as the climactic scene from the end of “Raiders Of The Lost Ark” when all of the Nazis’ faces exploded.
To date, Microsoft has only made two announcements about the crash and the service outage: (1) There’s definitely a very slim chance that maybe some of the users’ data might possibly one day be recovered, and (2) It was all Danger’s software and servers what done it. No hardware, software, or technology build by Microsoft played any role. “We had nuffin’ to do wit it. Nuffin’!”
Lesson Three: “If you don’t own and control a local, physical copy of your digital media, then the existence of that media is merely hypothetical.”
I’m a big fan of cloud computing services. I use them every day. But under no circumstances would I ever allow Flickr to have the only copies of my photos, or Zoho to have the only copies of my documents; or Google Mail to host the only copies of my address book and my mail archives.
And server meltdowns are by no means the only threat to your remote data. You didn’t actually read the Terms Of Use when you signed up for any of these services, did you?
No, I don’t really read them very carefully, either. But I know that each and every one of them carefully defines the many responsibilities that the service provider has to you, the user:
“The service provider has no responsibilities whatsoever to you, the user.”
Let’s move on to the forms of recourse that the user may enlist, should the service become unavailable at a critical moment, or lose your data:
“The user has no forms of recourse in the case of data loss, service unavailability, or executives from the server company sneaking into your yard at night and stealing your gas grill.”
You’re totally on your own. There’s absolutely no assurance that Flickr will still be here tomorrow. Yahoo! has every right to shut down my favorite service; my thousands of photos could simply vanish. Or, Yahoo! could suddenly decide to charge $50 a month for the service. They can do whatever they want. I have zero recourse.
Never forget that a file or data on a remote server is only a promise. And promises are only as good as the people who make them. Having only one copy of something risks disaster. Storing that sole copy on a faraway server that you don’t control is like committing suicide-by-cop.
Sidekick users are more or less up a creek. If the server crash didn’t wipe out your data, then your stuff will probably be safe on the device so long as you don’t reset it, remove the battery, or allow its batteries to die out. The phones still work. But they’ve instantly become refugees from the Sidekick servers that provide backup and syncing services.
Oh, and ominously enough, they’re no longer taking any orders for any new Sidekicks.
Microsoft’s deal with T-Mobile — the only Sidekick carrier in the US — requires them to compensate the carrier for interruptions in service related to those frail servers. The servers went down six days ago and I imagine that by now, conversations between T-Mobile and Microsoft have moved beyond Compensation and into the realm of Litigation.
The Sidekick is dead, dead, dead. My guess is that Microsoft will write some free software to backup data off of the device and onto the desktop. I’m certain that as soon as Microsoft can contractually terminate the Sidekick service, then that’ll be it for the Sidekick brand.
Well, it’s no great loss. The Sidekick was in a terminal spin to begin with. This catastrophe just prevented it from lingering long enough to become a burden to its loved ones.