I found a PDF that confirms the story I heard, and also has information I wasn't aware of until today:

https://availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0411/sidekick...

Details are on page 3.

* The Sidekick servers were moved to Microsoft, and I believe they were moved from where I last saw them, which was at T-Mobile's data center in Washington.

* There weren't a heck of a lot of Solaris experts at Microsoft at that time.

* According to the PDF above, someone had posted a job ad for a database administrator for the project, two months before the database blew up.

So if we connect the dots (this is speculation Microsoft, don't sue me):

It seems possible that the database for the Sidekick service was the responsibility of someone at T-Mobile or Danger, until Microsoft acquired Danger. My hunch is that it was probably TMo, because the founder of Danger left to go start Android in 2003. By the time Microsoft bought Danger in 2008, a lot of the original Danger folks were working on Android.

It sure seems like the outage was most likely caused by an inexperienced DBA taking responsibility for a database that had been the responsibility of the same DBA (at Danger, or more likely, TMo) for over half a decade.

And that ONE database outage probably changed the entire course of mobile phone history. IMHO, Microsoft wouldn't have purchased Nokia in 2014 if Danger hadn't blown up in 2008. And Danger was way ahead of the iPhone and Android in 2005.

In some alternate universe, there is no Android, there is just Microsoft Sidekick and Apple iPhone.

Wasn't the Sidekick the phone in the Paris Hilton hack? Man, that was a long time ago.

It was amazing. Ran circles around Android on weaker hardware, but because duopoly duo didn’t want to accept competitor it was artificially hamstrung and subsequently killed.

Spont on, I always considered WinRT, .NET Native, C++/CX is what COM evolution should have been back in 2001, instead of the J++ reboot.

However the way Microsoft has messed it all up, no one is left besides Windows team and some hardcode believers, to care about WinRT/WinUI any longer than what is only available via WinAppSDK.

Same here. My Lumia 635 was one of my best purchases ever, it was so capable for the price. It's a shame that they stopped believing in it.

I liked it too. But it never was great. E.g., I remember that the calculator had date computations, but the year input was a dropdown going from 1900 to 2100 or something like that.

Look at all 5 of us reminiscing here...

The Lumia Icon/930 I had was genuinely the best phone I have ever used, from both a hardware quality and software perspective. It made the competing iPhone 5 look like garbage.

How many abandoned attempts do you feel the Microsoft mobile developer ecosytem could take before losing all faith in yet another MS mobile strategy?

In the mobile space, there was no market for just Windows Phone apps. You needed to support native Android and iOS already. WP was just another burden without a clear return.

In their desperation they started paying college students for developing apps for the platform, leading to low quality experiences.

They pushed WP hard to their channel. Many employees in MS system integrators and managed services got very cheap phones, but outside that group, just nobody bought them before in the end they started dumping them to the masses as cheapest phone in the store, but there ain't no serious market there either.

the Nokia hardware was pretty great, too!

I bought a 4G Nokia 3310 yesterday, and to be honest, it’s actually not bad!

I honestly think that the windows phone development experience is where Microsoft majorly shit the bed. The sheer volume of breaking changes (and the severity of those breaks) meant rewriting a non-trivial amount of your app from version to version. I know multiple developers that just dropped support for windows phone as a result.

[dead]

I think if Microsoft had made an easier bridge, faster from Win32 to things like Live Tiles (and the Charms, too) there would have been a lot more people praising the Live Tiles today (and maybe even the Charms). Live Tiles really made their case on Windows Phone 8 where nearly every app supported them (relatively well), that was the only "Notification Center" for missed notifications, and its glanceability became very obvious.

Charms are somewhat similar, too. On iPhone almost every app needs a Share button somewhere and almost every app still has it in a different place today. On Windows Phone 8 it was much more obvious why a dedicated OS-level Share button accessible just about anywhere in any app was pretty great. On Desktop it wasn't seen as helpful as almost no apps supported it (either as shareable things or as apps that could be shared to) because there was no easy Win32 bridge and Microsoft also didn't think to try to integrate with clipboard operations until too late in Windows 8.1 (and then never quite delivered it because most everyone had already written off the Charms by then), as what could have been a potentially easy path to use the existing Windows "share paradigm" to bootstrap.

(You can make cases for the other 4 Charms as well beyond the Share charm, but the Share charm is the most obvious where Windows Phone proved it was a good idea but the Desktop didn't have enough supporting apps to also prove it there.)

Are live tiles universally praised? I see them mentioned positively occasionally, but I suspect they are getting some benefit… like, they are the Windows 8 feature that isn’t immediately obnoxious. Windows 8’s UI just didn’t have any redeeming features, so the element that is merely bad gets brought up as a sort of “see I’m not a relentlessly negative hater, I’m objective” thing, I bet. Is there a name for this trope?

I'm sure there was some meeting where at the end of the pitch deck was some one said:

"...and after people acclimate to them, we'll put ads there! Advertising Directly in the UI!"

Not to mention that WP7 customers couldn't upgrade to WP8, meant that both customers and resellers had devices they couldn't do shit with.

I used GNOME forever and didn't think much of it, until that horrid menu was added in 4x and I had to switch.

I really think GNOME is good at making an interface that works well on both, so is KDE to some extent with kirigami