When you have data you want to get rid of forever, whom are you going to call? There's one sure place to go: Redmond. You are assured of losing your data when you hand it to Microsoft.
The company is not in the habit of keeping backups. That's so yesterday.
No, Microsoft is out there in front of them all, modern-looking chief executive Satya Nadella in the lead, preaching the gospel of getting rid of the old and welcoming in the new.
The bitter truth must now be acknowledged: veteran tech journo Bob Cringely said it first and I have repeated it for some time, but never seen it up so close. Microsoft is a marketing company, not a technology company.
{loadposition sam08}This morning, we at iTWire were given a good idea of how the company that claims to be the leader in personal computing operates. Editor-in-chief Stan Beer was locked out of his Skype account on Thursday evening and told, in essence, that a decade's worth of business contacts, notes, editorial issues is all gone.
Getting locked out is fine. But not having a back-up of data? That's bordering on the farcical.
Some months back, the well-known financial expert Satyajit Das wrote an article for Fairfax Media titled "We don't need to be clever, just less stupid."
That's a good motto for Microsoft to adopt.
This is a day and age when storage costs are a joke. It's getting tough to find a hard drive that's smaller than 500GB.
And yet Microsoft has no storage space to keep Skype users' data. It is beyond a joke.
The only thing that Microsoft can do now is to approach the NSA: it would definitely have some buddies there, given all the data it has allowed the master spies to collect.