Tag: T-mobile
T-MO cloud fiasco
by tuxxer on Oct.12, 2009, under Thinking outside the phone
If you have for some reason following Perez Hilton on twitter, then you have been graced with epic rending screams regarding his cell service.
Back in the day, a company called Danger brought out a device called the sidekick and the most recent incantation of the device known as the sidekick2 is probably one of the first cloud devices. Stuff that any other phone would have on local drive is stored in a central server location, some where in the clouds and can be accessed at anytime.
Well what should not have been able to happen, happened. Who knows at this time what actually happened, but Microsofts servers deleted everyones data and folks that know are saying that it’s gone, simply gone.
Hopefully for those customers of T-Mo this is still early and that their data can be recovered, but it’s a faint hope at best. T-mobile has gone into damage control mode, allowing disgruntled customers to opt out of contracts with no fee, providing regular cell phones to others that are staying and halting sales of the device in question.
Other than expecting a class action lawsuit against T-Mobile and Microsoft, the owner of the sidekick, this one is going to send a shockwave through the computing industry.
This should in no way absolve the owners of the sidekick who lost data from any blame. To keep personal and business data on any device, without backing it up to a local hard drive is criminal enough in itself. Perez Hilton replying to one tweet, stated that T-mo assured him that he would never need to do that, and naively he believed them, the result for him is over 2000 contacts of email and phone numbers gone, and in his industry that’s a huge loss.
This is a clarion call for everyone, no matter who you are or the type of data you have, email contacts or recipes , cloud computing is the next generation of personal computing and it’s your responsibility to back up your data to a secured secondary location or burn it to a DVD, it may even spark an industry spin off that provides a means of doing this.
Tux
