the onda

Microsoft losing the Danger customers' data in such an irrecoverable and catastrophic way has reminded me of something that I've been thinking about ever since HP bought Tabblo and put the future of our own users' data in doubt.

On the one hand, who is to say that a little startup is any more reliable than a monster tech company when it comes to keeping data safe? After all, don't most startups die anyway? And when they do, you the user don't usually end up doing better than an announcement that says something like "In 30 days we're shutting everything off; have at it!" which does little to help transition anything.

On the other hand, startups— and particularly those that rely on user-generated content— have an alignment of incentives to the death with their users that usually counts for more than executive reorgs and organizational recharters when it comes to keeping that data safe and online. Data loss does happen (after all, competence handling a server falls into a normal distribution like any other skill), but the reality is that I feel much safer trusting the preservation of my data to a little company ten times out of ten provided I understand the little company's business model well enough to know that my data won't ever be used in a way I don't like.

Of course, big companies are going to keep buying little companies— this is, after all, the very definition of success in our ecosystem. But what we may need to do as an industry is come up with some sort of GPL-like contract with our users that allow them to reasonably port their data away should the company experience a "change of control" event. I've written about a similar issue around the business model inspired paywalls like the one Instructables threw up last year, and in some ways this case quite similar.

What is the downside to this approach? Acquirers might not be too fond of the fact that they'd have to open up their servers and work towards giving users a path out. In fact, in some cases I could see such a term being used to try to argue for a discount on the acquisition price (this used to be pretty common for instance, when startups used certain open source software components).

But I'd imagine that if you were a Sidekick user today and had lost half of your contacts because the JV team has been doing your SAN migration due to a "corporate re-prioritization," you might think twice about sticking around for the next service you put your data into once it migrates to a different corporate entity. It's why I stopped using Friendfeed the moment Facebook bought them (despite liking the service and having nothing against Facebook). It's why I was glad never to have jumped on the Mint.com bandwagon once I saw they were going to Intuit. In each of these cases, I may be on the leading edge, but I think people will clue in.