Comment by johnvanommen

Comment by johnvanommen 8 hours ago

I found a PDF that confirms the story I heard, and also has information I wasn't aware of until today:

https://availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0411/sidekick...

Details are on page 3.

* The Sidekick servers were moved to Microsoft, and I believe they were moved from where I last saw them, which was at T-Mobile's data center in Washington.

* There weren't a heck of a lot of Solaris experts at Microsoft at that time.

* According to the PDF above, someone had posted a job ad for a database administrator for the project, two months before the database blew up.

So if we connect the dots (this is speculation Microsoft, don't sue me):

It seems possible that the database for the Sidekick service was the responsibility of someone at T-Mobile or Danger, until Microsoft acquired Danger. My hunch is that it was probably TMo, because the founder of Danger left to go start Android in 2003. By the time Microsoft bought Danger in 2008, a lot of the original Danger folks were working on Android.

It sure seems like the outage was most likely caused by an inexperienced DBA taking responsibility for a database that had been the responsibility of the same DBA (at Danger, or more likely, TMo) for over half a decade.

And that ONE database outage probably changed the entire course of mobile phone history. IMHO, Microsoft wouldn't have purchased Nokia in 2014 if Danger hadn't blown up in 2008. And Danger was way ahead of the iPhone and Android in 2005.

In some alternate universe, there is no Android, there is just Microsoft Sidekick and Apple iPhone.

protastus 7 hours ago

I always thought it was hilarious that a company called Danger lost everybody's data. The connection to Microsoft only makes it better.

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johnvanommen 6 hours ago

> I always thought it was hilarious that a company called Danger lost everybody's data. The connection to Microsoft only makes it better.
Cursed marketing.
Besides the fact that we didn't have any real money to promote phones at T-Mobile (and I think we were the only US carrier with the hiptop) -
Would you believe that the first hiptop came out the same week as 9/11?!
So it was this phone that was arguably two-ish years ahead of the iPhone, but nobody seemed to know it existed, until it got some traction via sheer word of mouth. Everyone who used the HipTop basically wouldn't go back to anything else at all. The HipTop had that 'addictive' quality that the iPhone had. It was nothing like the Blackberry, where people largely used it for a single killer app.

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- bananaflag an hour ago
  
  It was announced in Sep 2001, came out in Oct 2002 (these long waits were then common for mobile phones).
  I first read a review of it in a Mar 2003 magazine.
  
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