One of the biggest stories over this past weekend was the Great Sidekick Fail of 2009. As a prospective user (well, OK, low chances of being a prospective user now) this incident is causing a lot of alarms to go off. Both Engadget and other sources (HipTop 3 for example) are pointing to a lack of backups and a failure to move servers or merge data.

Well, OK, the failure to merge data or move to different providers I get, stuff happens. But I don't get the lack of valid and working backups. How does something like this happen in 2009 at the enterprise level? Individual users I get, but enterprise? This also makes me wonder why Danger didn't have a good synching solution for desktops. I know it came with Intellisync but on the Mac there was no solution for synching so you were stuck. (Yes there was the missing sync, but they discontinued it years ago).

This failure isn't a bad thing thought. Microsoft needs to eat some crow for letting this happen, BUT it's a great opportunity to decentralize the device OS from the server so that it's not carrier dependent (Sidekicks on AT&T anyone? or any carrier you want for that matter), an opportunity to make local backup a serious option (via exchange and/or activesync for those photos and other media you record with your device), and an opportunity to not worry about legacy data!

One door closes, another one opens :-)