More rumors are surfacing regarding the Sidekick debacle. AppleInsider says that it has a couple of sources on what happened; one that points to changes within the data center being instituted and one that speculates about sabotage:
Additional insiders have stepped forward to shed more light into Microsoft's troubled acquisition of Danger, its beleaguered Pink Project, and what has become one of the most high profile Information Technology disasters in recent memory.
The sources point to longstanding management issues, a culture of "dogfooding" (to eradicate any vestiges of competitor's technologies after an acquisition), and evidence that could suggest the failure was the result of a deliberate act of sabotage.
Reading the article closely, it looks like both sources really don't have solid information about what actually happened. They are speculating and so a heavy dose of skepticism is in order. There are a few more details there about what the operating environment was like, and apparently there was indeed a SAN involved, an EMC one if the article is to be trusted. I would expect so in this day and age, but there are similar options that could have been employed. Once you have taken that leap, you should easily be assured of being in the area of the upper 90% of your data is backed up. I haven't seen any figures, but it sounds like far more data was lost than that.
I'm not going to speculate myself. I can see how either scenario is possible. I find it hard to believe that people at that level would institute changes without thorough testing and a rollback plan...but then I've seen some of that bullshit up close and personal at a decent sized but much smaller organization, so who knows?
And I don't know about sabotage either, but it's not out of the question. The fact of the matter is it is very difficult to build a foolproof system that at least one IT employee can't screw over pretty thoroughly. I don't think my former employers ever truly understood how I could have destroyed them in a matter of hours in the dark of the night. Not just the operational systems, but all of the backup and media they would need to recover. I was pissed and stress had left me not entirely in my right mind when I quit, but the thought didn't even occur to me. It would have been immoral, a betrayal akin to cheating on your spouse or spying for the enemy of your country. Illegal too, but that may or may not have stopped me if I thought it was a moral act. It wasn't even close though.
When I was an IT guy, there were about six people in another IT section who could wreak some serious damage that we could recover from with some major pain. There were three of us who could totally screw the company. I bet there were way more at the possibly ironically named Danger. I suspect that there is a great story and lesson for many companies here if we are ever allowed to see it. Far beyond the very real caveats that people are issuing now about cloud computing.
Recent Comments