Microsoft takes credit for resolving Sidekick data loss, but not for causing it

It's been no secret that the Premium Mobile Services group at Microsoft, headed by Corporate Vice President Roz Ho, has been working on a secret class of consumer-facing mobile projects, least secretly of all a wireless content service code-named Pink. As late as last Tuesday, speculation centered around Pink's connection with Danger, the data service for T-Mobile's Sidekick device, and ground zero for last weekend's colossal service failure. Surely Danger should be tied in somehow with Microsoft's big plans in mobile, enthusiasts thought.

But this morning, in the midst of damage control, Ms. Ho found herself revealing a card she might not have been ready to play just yet: In a message to customers published on T-Mobile's Web site, she apologized on behalf of Microsoft for the service failure, while announcing the near-complete recovery of users' lost data. But she then revealed -- and a spokesperson also confirmed to the Los Angeles Times -- that Danger had not actually been using Microsoft's technology for Sidekick service, despite having had since April of last year to implement it.

The first clue comes from this paragraph: "We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up," Ho writes, acknowledging the single point of failure. "We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data."

In addressing the problem of whose system it was that failed and why, the Microsoft spokesperson told the LA Times' David Sarno, "The Danger Service platform, which experienced the outage, is a standalone service operating on non-Microsoft technologies, and is not related to Microsoft's cloud services platform or Windows Live." Certainly future renditions of mobile services should be built on Microsoft's platforms, the spokesperson went on, though surprisingly she did not mention the Danger brand in reference to such future services.

The message there from Microsoft was apparently, don't blame us for the Danger Service Platform, it wasn't built on our watch.

When Microsoft acquired Danger in April 2008, co-founder Matt Hershenson said at the time that his business' first priority would be to integrate Microsoft's platform. "As we combine our team and technologies with Microsoft, we see a clear path to evolving that experience and delivering it to an even broader group of consumers," Hershenson stated then.

A lack of any substantive transition from Danger's original Sidekick service to a division prepared to deploy Pink, would appear to confirm a report just last week from MobileCrunch's Greg Kumparak. That report cited an anonymous source with "seemingly exhaustive knowledge" of the Pink project as saying that it was going nowhere -- specifically, that most of Danger's resources on the project had actually been let go by Microsoft, leaving "no braintrust that understands how to build a product."

Just last week, analyst Henry Blodget was publicly advising Microsoft to acquire BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, if it wants a real consumer-facing mobile service player and wants it fast. One wonders whether Blodget would make the same recommendation now.