• Tech Crunch et al., Thursday, October 15, 2009 12:05 PM

If the future is indeed mobile, as many pundits believe, then Microsoft's future is looking shaky at best. Just weeks after debuting its new mobile operating system to scathing reviews, the Redmond, Wash.-company is on the defensive about its subsidiary Danger erasing the personal data of an estimated 800,000 T-Mobile Sidekick users. Seemingly, not even news on Thursday that "most, if not all" of the data will be recovered will be enough to change the perception of Microsoft as absentminded mobile proprietor.

"Even considered as an extended outage, it is unacceptable service," writes industry journalist Tim Anderson on his ITWriting blog.

That Microsoft is saying the data loss, and the problems that led to it, were limited to a segment of the company's network that is separate from its core cloud infrastructure isn't good enough the Anderson. "Danger has been part of Microsoft for long enough that customers cannot reasonably be expected to distinguish it from other services run by the company."

"Old-fashioned folks would call it closing the barn after the horse has bolted," writes Om Malik on GigaOm. "I just call it too little, too late."

Worse still, AppleInsider is reporting that "engineers familiar with Microsoft's internal operations" are saying with regard to its mobile operations: "No one really grasps how dysfunctional Microsoft has become."

Either way, writes TechCrunch, "It's still a giant fuck-up ... the whole debacle has reflected very poorly on all companies involved, and it will linger long."

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