Dogfooding, Danger, Microsoft, and Contingency Plans

by James Hatch on October 13, 2009

None of this should be a surprise to anyone who follows technology developments, particularly around cloud technologies, Microsoft, or something as simple as a  computer repair store… contingency plans.

When I was younger, I was writing a book and started a site that was dedicated to being a virtual peer counselor. I was prone to not backing up then, thinking that whatever I did would never fail. I had never had a virus I didn’t seek out due to curiosity, had never had a hard drive fail that I cared about, and things were just fine… until a lightning strike hit a telephone wire just outside my house, ran down the line and into my internal modem, while I was doing my first backup of my life. It fried everything. Since then, I backup to multiple external drives, two for my primary machine, one for my backup machine, and a third for my important documents which allows me to carry that stuff whenever I want to. Should something fail… I have exact duplicates except for the hours since last backup. That is a contingency plan. Albeit a bit low level.

In comes Microsoft / Danger… their interaction and the creation of Pink, may have led to the implosion of many things. Unfortunately, the biggest losers in all of this seems to be Danger customers on T-Mobile. The pulling of the pin on the Unholy Hand-grenade of working with Microsoft seems to me, to be a recurring event. This brings about a term called Dogfooding. That is the act of wiping out a company, munching it up and throwing it to the dogs. Like you would do with a nice big bone, but not as tasty to anyone involved.

AppleInsider talks about the various elements of previous Microsoft caused implosions, but they also have a history of becoming primary consumers of a good and company, and then retracting for whatever reason leaving it to implode on its own [or so it would seem], case is point was a company called RealNames. This is back in 2002 if I remember correctly. Then Microsoft gobbled up the remnants. That would be like Wal-Mart doing a deal with a producer, a producer who wanted to solely work with Wal-Mart, and then Wal-Mart pulling the plug on their contract knowing that the producer underbid to simply get access to Wal-Mart distribution channels. Sure, Wal-Mart would have to pay eventually, but the court battle would destroy the producer.

Where the fault lies in the Microsoft/Danger – T-Mobile fiasco hasn’t been revealed completely yet. A lot of he-said, she-said.

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