Chris Farris

If your company seems evil, the best programmers won’t work for you. That hurt Microsoft a lot starting in the 90s. Programmers started to feel sheepish about working there. It seemed like selling out. When people from Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where they worked, there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes about having gone over to the dark side. But the real problem for Microsoft wasn’t the embarrassment of the people they hired.

Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks. Good IT pros are not anti-bureaucracy, as many observers think. They are anti-stupidity. The difference is both subjective and subtle. Good IT pros, whether they are expected to or not, have to operate and make decisions with little supervision. So when the rules are loose and logical and supervision is results-oriented, supportive and helpful to the process, IT pros are loyal, open, engaged and downright sociable.

AppleInsider | Microsoft’s Sidekick/Pink problems blamed on dogfooding and sabotage. The article posits two questions: Was MSFT trying to pull a hotmail and convert the service to its own products (like it did in the 90s when it converted the stable Unix Hotmail infrastructure to NT4) or was it sabotage by a disgruntled employee. I think it would be pretty damn hard to corrupt the systems, corrupt the data, and corrupt all the backups to the point that recovery isn’t possible.

So it seems like the anti-cloud fanatics are all popping open beers in celebration of MSFT’s failure to restore user data for T-Mobile’s sidekick. I’m not sure I’d blame clouds, cause I’m not sure I’d consider that T-Mobile service a cloud to begin with. Unless you consider your IMAP box at your ISP a cloud, or your corporate exchange server a cloud, or wiki a cloud. Sidekick is a service. Services go down.