Tuesday 4 January 2011

Tough Week for Microsoft

Well Microsoft have not had too good a start to the New Year.

First bit of bad news was that whilst doing some server maintenance last week, they managed to lose the emails of some 17,000 odd customers who subscribe to their Hotmail service.  Luckily though, Microsoft were able to restore them from backup but quite a few people were sweating for a few hours i'll bet.  Still it does serve to point out the need for good backups.  I remember losing a hard drive a few years ago with all my company data on it.  I recovered most of it but it was very hard work.  So now i have at least 2 backups of everything updated daily.  When was the last time you backed up dear reader?

Secondly, users of the brand new Windows Phone 7 have been reporting higher than expected data usage on their phones to the extent that some are using up all their monthly allowance of data well before the month is over. What appears to be happening is that although a wifi network maybe in range, the phone is continuing to use the phone company connection rather than the wifi connection to download data thus incurring unexpected charges.  It is unclear at the moment if this is a bug in the software or an intentional thing from Microsoft.  The cynical would of course say it is deliberate and a ploy by Microsoft to earn money for the companies selling their phones, but personally i think it is a bug that will be sorted fairly quickly.  After all people will just ignore Windows Phone 7 in favour of Android/iPhone/Blackberry/Symbian if they don't fix it.

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