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. On the other hand MSFT acquired this company and the company had technologies vastly different than MSFT’s core competencies. Its quite possible the original engineers could recover the service and data, while the MSFT people cannot.
As this older article on the subject points out:
Microsoft’s accountability in supporting its acquired Sidekick support obligations with T-Mobile was also shirked. The source stated that “apparently Microsoft has been lying to them [T-Mobile] this whole time about the amount of resources that they’ve been putting behind Sidekick development and support [at Danger] (in reality, it was cut down to a handful of people in Palo Alto managing some contractors in Romania, Ukraine, etc.). The reason for the deceit wasn’t purely to cover up the development of Pink but also because Microsoft could get more money from T-Mobile for their support contract if T-Mobile thought that there were still hundreds of engineers working on the Sidekick platform. As we saw from their recent embarrassment with Sidekick data outages, that has clearly not been the case for some time.”
It seems pretty clear that no matter what happened, the fault rests with Microsoft Management.