I think that's the most twisted definition of "dogfooding" I've ever heard.<p>Also, this article seems to be about 98% speculation from a site that has no previous history of "inside sources" at Microsoft. Boo on that.
I don't think it's fair to rule out the possibility of a simple screw-up. I've been responsible for important web services and I took a lot of precautions, but I can't say it was inconceivable that something could have gone wrong causing major permanent data loss. There are so many ways in which failures can cascade in a complex system there can be no absolute guarantees.<p>Can anyone quantify how much address book data there was? As an outside guess, 1,000,000 customers times 1000 addresses times 300 bytes each is only 300 GB. They could have kept an emergency backup on rsync.net for $300 / month. I keep secondary, well-encrypted backups of things I particularly care about (not nearly 300 GB worth) there, as well as on a USB disk under my bed, in addition to the regular complete backups.
Good article.<p>Once upon a time, I wrote a series of opensource iSync plugins for the sidekick/hiptop platform, back when Danger first opened up their XML-RPC Service.<p>Then it came out that in order to run in "production" (e.g. on a phone without a developer provisioning loaded) your app had to have t-mobiles permission. We kept repeatedly getting told "no" on the iSync plugin, that they had no interest in supporting Mac. Then of course a commercial plugin appeared and I got fed up and stopped trying, getting the clear impression that commercial was what T-Mobile wanted.<p>Mostly however, it was the shock in realizing that you had no access to your own data as a standard user. You were completely and utterly locked in to that device, with no alternative.
Microsoft's insistance on rebuilding with their own technologies must put them at a big competitive disadvantage. Google can buy up just about any small web company and have 100% code compatibility from day one.