“What makes things even worse is that there’s no way to sync your personal data directly to your PC. T-Mobile provides for a small fee a third-party app download to sync your data with Outlook on a Windows PC (and there was a similar app for Mac at one point, but it was discontinued some time ago, pre-acquisition), but I don’t think it syncs email messages, I know it doesn’t sync SMS [messages], and what’s worse is that it syncs from the cloud to the PC, not from the device to the PC.
It's the idea of a " catastrophic failure of the worst possible kind" that leads to the same sort of thinking that powers all conspiracy theories:
the fact that no data could be recovered after the problem with battery such as dell Latitude 131L battery , dell 312-0350 battery , dell 1691P battery , dell 8M815 battery , dell Latitude X1 battery , dell U6256 battery , dell Latitude X300 battery , dell W0465 battery , dell Y9943 battery , dell Vostro 1200 battery , dell RM628 battery , dell Vostro 1310 battery erupted at the beginning of October suggests that the outage and the inability to recover any backups were the result of intentional sabotage by a disgruntled employee. In any other circumstance, Microsoft or T-Mobile would likely have come forward with an explanation of the mitigating circumstances, blaming bad hardware, a power failure, or some freak accident.
An act of sabotage ”would explain why neither party is releasing any more details: for legal reasons dealing with the ongoing investigation to find the culprit(s),“ one of the sources said. Due to the way Sidekick clients interact with the service, any normal failure should have resulted in only a brief outage until a replacement server could be brought up.
Paranoid, perhaps, but not entirely implausible. Occam's Razor, though, still slices toward plain old incompetence.
In any event, Dilger's tour-de-force does more than just explain how Microsoft's storage area network failed and how T-Mobile, and its million-plus Sidekick users, bear all the brunt and none of the blame. It also describes just how Microsoft's Pink development team — charged with the impossible task of coming up with an iPhone killer — did, and didn't, fit into the existing structure of a company that had separate Windows Mobile and Zune development groups as well. All in about 2500 words. Go read it: here's the link again.