Danger, Inc.

» see danger.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

danger's phone never went on sale in turkey and i have never held one. what made me read about the company years afterward was not the hardware, it was the shape of the system. in 2000 danger built a phone that could not do its job without a server. the thing in your hand was deliberately thin. the actual product sat in a data center in palo alto and the device was a terminal pointed at it.

andy rubin started the company on 9 december 1999 with joe britt and matt hershenson, out of the apple and webtv diaspora. the first plan was not even a phone. it was a small connected gadget of some undecided kind, and it turned into the hiptop, which t-mobile licensed and sold in the united states as the sidekick from october 2002.

the interesting decisions were all on the server side. mail was pushed rather than fetched. the browser did not render the web on the phone, it asked danger's proxy to chew the page down to something an EDGE connection could carry. your contacts and your messages lived upstream and synced down, so a lost phone cost you a phone and nothing else. there was a catalog of downloadable apps years before anyone called that an app store. rubin left around 2003 to start a company called android, and you can see the whole hiptop argument again in what he built there, minus the part where the vendor owns your data.

microsoft announced it was buying danger on 11 february 2008 for a figure widely reported at about 500 million dollars. by october 2009 most of the people who had come over with the deal were gone. the service they had built outlived them by about eighteen months.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

the phrase people reach for now is thin client, and that is close enough. danger sold a subscription to a service and shipped a piece of plastic to reach it with. the economics worked because t-mobile billed a monthly data fee and danger took a cut of every one, which meant danger got paid for the thing it actually operated rather than for a one-time sale of metal.

the tradeoff was total. no danger service meant no browser and no address book. every review of the hiptop noticed how fast the web felt on a slow connection and almost nobody wrote down what that speed was made of. it was made of a company in california standing between you and the internet, permanently, by design.

~ the day the cloud lost everything ~

on 12 october 2009 a storage failure in the danger data centers wiped sidekick user data off microsoft's servers. contacts and calendars vanished. because the devices held nothing durable on their own, anyone whose phone rebooted or ran flat came back to an empty handset. microsoft first said the data was probably unrecoverable, then spent more than two months restoring most of it from tape backups that were roughly a month old.

this is the part that outlived the company as a lesson. before october 2009 the phrase "it's in the cloud" was a reassurance you gave someone. after it, ordinary people who had never thought about where a file lives had a concrete story about what happens when the answer is "somewhere else, on hardware you do not control." engineers already knew. everyone else found out from a phone.

~ what replaced it ~

the danger staff inside microsoft were folded into a project called Pink, which shipped in may 2010 as the Kin. microsoft killed it about seven weeks later, which is a shorter life than most people's return window. it remains the clearest evidence that buying a team is not the same as buying whatever made the team good.

t-mobile turned off the danger service on 31 may 2011 and the last hiptops became objects with a keyboard and no purpose. rubin's second company was by then the largest phone platform on earth, running a version of the same bet: your phone is a window onto a company's servers, and your data lives with them. danger lost. the idea won completely.

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