[Editor’s Note: Originally from the editorial backchannel (see original). –mrh]

Chris Ziegler at Engadget posted late yesterday that:

“Alleged details on the events leading up to Danger’s doomsday scenario are starting to come out of the woodwork, and it all paints a truly embarrassing picture: Microsoft, possibly trying to compensate for lost and / or laid-off Danger employees, outsources an upgrade of its Sidekick SAN to Hitachi, which — for reasons unknown — fails to make a backup before starting. Long story short, the upgrade runs into complications, data is lost, and without a backup to revert to, untold thousands of Sidekick users get shafted in an epic way”

The irony here folks is that many in the popular press idiot seats are using this whole incident as a reason to mistrust cloud computing–when Amazon S3 would have proved a lot more fool proof way of outsourcing this data, than hiring some random PS guys to do custom SAN work.

Where is the NYT’s article now screaming out that SAN’s aren’t ‘enterprise ready.’? They won’t because fear is part of the hazing cycle for any new idea–but we reserve panic when already vetted and understood ideas cause problems. Its why the average person is likely more afraid to fly (if they do it infrequently) than to drive. The fear has nothing to do with their statistical saftey, but with the strangeness/newness of the idea.

We can easily dismiss a SAN failure without calling for all enterprises to cleanse themselves of storage SANs–but cloud computing failures, or apparent ones, scare us to the extreme, because the apparent failure is also bonded to an idea–which isn’t vetted, untested, and just gosh darn, new.

As Camus observed in The Plague “Even a life that can be explained with bad reasons, is a familiar one.” So much the same with today’s enterprise IT failures. When 10k customer names walk out of a data-center in the form of a tape drive we shrug, point an admonishing finger, hope for some new processes.

I guess I’m taking this opportunity to make a human observation–we just aren’t wired well to accept new ideas quickly and appropriately–and we aren’t wired to see the big flaws and opportunity costs in our existing ones. Its why VCs exist–to fund the very few people who see the flaws clearly.