T-Mobile Sidekick Users Lose All Data: Cloud Computing Failure

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Sidekick users got some bad news: their data is lost. T-Mobile's Sidekick customers have faced a weeklong data outage, and have not been able to access their address books, photos, and calendars. Several of my friends began complaining about this on Facebook, and the writing on the wall became clear: we're about to see the first high-proofile cloud-computing failure in the mobile industry. Indeed, all Sidekick data is stored remotely on Microsoft servers, which suffered a series of catastrophic outages, making the likelihood of Sidekick data recovery nearly zero.

The lesson here is to keep mission-critical data local, but most Sidekick users aren't sysadmins: they're young people who like to text, and don't even know what "cloud computing" is.  Websites requie cloud computing (or Cont Distribution Networks --CDNs) to facilitate high-traffic and permissions-rich transactions: Facebook itself woudl crumble without some sort of cloud in place. Google Docs is cloud computing. However, that doesn't mean that you need the cloud for your phone.