Bruce Bostwick wrote:
Part of my concern with the concept in general is the fairly glaring
admin/management deficiency described in this article:
http://dailyqi.com/?p=10576
I've been avoiding most articles on this subject because there is a lot
of FUD out there and very little real truth. Some of that is T-Mobile
blamestorming and some of that is the usual sorts that like any
opportunity to smear Microsoft. It's very easy to focus on the negative
case studies in "cloud computing" and miss the 99.9% of the time when
stuff works as it is supposed to. No one buys digital ads for articles
about "the status quo works, go back to sleep".
Danger was acquired in February of this year and I wouldn't be surprised
that the majority of the infrastructure in question predated the
acquisition. Even big companies like Microsoft can't magically change
infrastructure with the snap of a finger...
Furthermore, to my knowledge, Microsoft/Danger have been explicitly mum
about what precisely the technological glitches were that lead to the
failures. It's certainly easy to presume that "there were no backups at
all", but at this point it is still hearsay, at best, and my money is on
slander.
I've heard that some of the affected customers have already started to
get some of their personal data back and the press release from
Microsoft declares that they are "confident" that they will restore the
majority of it, which seems to contradict the "no backups at all" theory
pretty well. (I doubt that they would remain "confident" if they were
combing disks in clean rooms for good sectors...)
Certainly Microsoft isn't entirely blameless, you would assume a
technical audit would be an early priority in any acquisition.
Presumably stability issues would be a huge priority and reliability
engineers would be some of the first gated into a acquisition project.
More particularly, I think that T-Mobile isn't nearly as blameless as
they would like to believe or portray themselves as. Getting back to
that "it's who you ask the questions" of problem, T-Mobile was the first
call in that chain (their name is branded on the product!) and if their
answer at any point was "we don't know about our service's reliability"
or "our service is absolutely reliable" without connection to reality
(and without in turn encouraging customers to talk to Danger if they
wanted deeper answers), then they are absolutely a part of the blame and
a part of the problem.
All of which isn't to say that your fears, Barry, are unwarranted or
that caution doesn't apply. More that I think that journalists (and
almost especially "tech" journalists) seem to be having a harder and
harder time reflecting technical reality and I think there is a need for
some mechanism to break the tedious Hype then Fear/FUD/Doom/Gloom cycle.
To me this is exactly the sort of story that breaks that doesn't get a
healthy grain of salt...
--
--Max Battcher--
http://worldmaker.ne
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