Microsoft's admission that they had initially lost a ton of their user's data came as no surprise to me. Regular readers of my postings know that I think the company is somewhere between incompetent and evil, with little regard for quality, service, or even their customers. They're a sales and profit machine still living the monopolist's good life, at least for a few more years. But I will no longer give them any of my hard-earned funds, barring exceptional cases requiring a software upgrade, and a PC or two running Windows 7 for future Network World testing purposes. The current debacle seems to be in the process of reaching a happy ending (which itself reveals an almost comical incompetence on Microsoft's part), but my opinion of Microsoft hasn't changed regardless.
On the other hand, there's a great big cautionary tale here, irrespective of Microsoft's involvement. I'm a huge fan of Web services, cloud computing, and the like; these strategies represent the best hope for the future of mobility - anytime, anywhere access to data and processor resources, lower costs, device independence, and increased convenience. But, as we saw here, what happens when the cloud goes bad? Ignoring poor software quality for the moment, network and device failures do occur; at a minimum, data backup under user control is always a good idea. But it seems that, all too often, the providers of these services simply have not done the end-to-end thinking to offer users what they need - reliability, availability, quality, and all of those other descriptive terms with "ity" at the end. Whip-it-together-and-sell-the-crap-out-of-it is no longer sufficient or even mildly entertaining. People's careers and even their lives depend upon service providers doing a better job.
Given Microsoft's lack of regard for product and service quality, I'm not surprised at what happened here. But this problem is far more widespread. I've been having problems, for example, with Yahoo Mail practically from day one. Search doesn't work reliably. The service (which I pay for, BTW) is occasionally very slow or even unavailable. And there's no way to do backups anymore - and the facility they removed seldom worked anyway. Microsoft and Yahoo are seemingly made for each other; their respective corporate lack of concern for the needs of their customers should eventually mesh nicely into one of the most incompetent corporations on the planet (yes, I still think they will eventually merge). Or they might, with appropriate leadership, get their individual and collective acts together at some point; who knows?
But, again, this problem isn't unique to these two (don't get me started on the cellular carriers). We often don't find out where the weak links are until it's too late - you know, when it's difficult to switch to another service. But don't ever think that you're covered - read your contact with just about any service provider: "You, the Customer, will send us money. We, the Supplier, may or may not do something for you. We might screw up big time, lose your data, fail to provide the service you contracted for, whatever. Too bad. Tough luck. We're not responsible. We don't care. And you will continue send us money no matter what we do, and you have no recourse if we fail." This is shameful, and it needs to stop. Perhaps, and I hate to say this, it's time for a little legislative action on the quality front - including penalties with teeth.
Mathias is a principal at Farpoint Group, a wireless advisory firm in Ashland, Mass.
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