Bill Gates built a very successful company, but it mirrors his personality — smart but paranoid, self-centered and with a little Asperger’s thrown in. You can trace the craziness all the way back to his famous 1976 “Open Letter to Hobbyists”.

What Gates failed to do was build a company that could stay strong without his guidance. Perhaps if he had read more Confucius instead of playing poker all the time…

Though to be honest the hole things stupid anyways the sidekick system makes little sense i had a 2 and unless you had a signal at the time you wanted to use it and the 5mins prior to that you where cracking but once it went all the data on the phone was gone till the signal came back.

And for the record I am against putting sensitive info on “the cloud”

So, when they’ve fixed the problem, you can still get your data.

If you pay MS for the service, then you are correct.

I think you maybe mistaken on this one. The deal as far as i am aware after talking to a tmobile member of staff (maby not the most reliable sourse) is not an out sourceing one. T-mobile mearly sell the phones and run the plans whilst Danger/Microsoft run the well clever part the cloud and make the hardware/software at the end of the day tmobile aren’t as responcible as you make out. Its microsoft that cut the corner by outsourcing not tmobile. Its similar to the way tmobile run there blackberries in that all they do is the data/cell service and RIM make the hardware and set you up on their system (which i would imagine is thourghly backedup by know)

This perfectly illustrates the dangers of outsourcing. Even if you choose a well established vendor (Microsoft in this case), have SLA’s (they did), you can still get burned.

Lesson learned for business: An SLA is not enough. You must also audit and test your vendors. A good disaster recovery drill on T-Mobile’s part would have uncovered this problem before it happened.

The fact that T-Mobile blindly trusted their vendor was T-Mobile’s mistake. Microsoft did what any subcontractor/vendor does over time when not being closely watched. They boost their profits by taking shortcuts.

While it is true that MS f**ked up, and that will hurt their subcontracting business, the buck stops with T-Mobile. T-Mobile’s customers rightly don’t care who, or how, T-Mobile gets the job done.

Little Brittany and LaQuisha will just have to look up the number of their ecstasy dealer and reprogram their speed dials when the service comes back up.

It’s no rumour that T-mobile has suspended sidekick sales or that T-mobile clients lost data. Where’s the rumour? Sidekick was getting fed by M$/Danger. T-Mobile and M$/Danger have apologized. T-Mobile has put sidekicks on their website as – temporarily out of stock. These are all facts not rumours.

Though, I still don’t know why DU editors provide the links. No one visiting here actually reads the articles.