I am a huge fan of Live Mesh. I started using Live Mesh (during my stint at Microsoft) even before it was announced to the public.
Live Mesh was announced at Mix08 in April 2008 amid fanfare by Ray Ozzie. Ozzie passionately positioned Live Mesh as a “single device mesh”. The Sync culture was brought into Microsoft by Ray Ozzie. Ozzie first outlined his vision for mesh like technology in his internal memo “The Internet Services Disruption”.
Live Mesh was certainly sounded exciting for more than one reason. First, it was one of the early ‘Cloud to Consumer’ technologies. While the businesses and developers were busy figuring out Amazon S3 (which was the only popular Cloud service at that time), it was Live Mesh that promised a synchronized desktop on the Cloud straight to the consumer. Microsoft had a huge opportunity of taking this service to millions of Hotmail and Live subscribers to entice them to stick with Windows Live service. Second, it was positioned as a developer platform to deploy synchronized applications that could seamlessly work on Windows Desktop and the Live Desktop. Silverlight was the key technology that brought the offline capabilities to applications that could either run within the browser on the Live Desktop and the traditional Windows Desktop. The Sync Framework was working behind the scenes to synchronize the data across multiple instances of the applications. Though the term Platform as a Service (PaaS) was not much popular at that time, it was one of the first PaaS offerings that got announced even before Azure got officially announced at PDC08.
Live Mesh as a Platform
Live Mesh stood out despite the confusion Microsoft created through its acquired FolderShare (Now called Windows Live Sync), SyncToy and SkyDrive which had similar capabilities. There is a definite value that Live Mesh brings. I will be one of the first subscribers to pay for going beyond the 5GB free limit of Live Mesh. I have 2 Desktops, a Windows Media Center, a Notebook PC and a MacBook Pro running OS X. I trust Live Mesh to keep my photos, music, movies and documents in sync across all these machines. I extensively use the P2P sync to synchronize movies and large files across machines. I sync a subset of my documents folder to the Live Desktop that I access from Opera Mini browser running on my Nokia E63. I have access to my essential data anytime and anywhere. I also use the Remote Desktop feature to logon to my home PC remotely. I can use DropBox or other sync tool, but I like Live Mesh for its integrated features and light weight approach.
Microsoft Live Mesh
Sync is the most important application today. In an article by Joe Wilcox (@joewilcox) dated March. 11, 2008, he mentioned that “should Google get synchronization right before Microsoft, it would be game over. Google would be able to extend the relevancy of the Web platform back to the desktop on its terms — think invading army — and across many devices or services.” It is Google and Apple that got the sync story right. The biggest mistake of Microsoft was to license ActiveSync to Google. I use a piece of software that relies on Microsoft ActiveSync called ‘Mail for Exchange‘ on my Nokia E63 phone to sync my personal email, contacts and calendar from Google! It is Microsoft enabling two of its competitors to collaborate better. In fact, it is ‘Mail for Exchange’ that gave me the confidence to move away from my old Windows Mobile device as I would still be able to keep my contacts, mail and calendar on the (Google Apps) Cloud. Microsoft is losing the Sync battle!
Microsoft has every opportunity to leverage Live Mesh to get close to the consumers. What concerns me is that Microsoft has almost given up on Live Mesh! Do you need evidence? There hasn’t been any service release or an update for a long time. The Live Mesh blog had their last post on Oct. 19, 2009! The Developer SDK has been discontinued as of Sep. 8th 2009 and there hasn’t been any news on it till date! The Mix10 agenda doesn’t have a single session on Live Mesh. It almost looks like MS may pull the plug on Live Mesh any moment (or may be it has already pulled it).
Microsoft, please don’t kill Live Mesh!
Update – It’s quite a coincidence! Mary Jo Foley posted an article titled ‘Live Mesh: It’s alive!‘ few hours after I posted my rant. This gave me a ray of hope!
As a Cloud Computing Strategist, Janakiram MSV helps businesses understand and adopt the Cloud Computing paradigm. His core strength is designing and architecting solutions for the Cloud. Janakiram focuses on industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings including Microsoft Windows Azure.
