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Microsoft’s Live Mesh: Some Thoughts

So last night (or 5am for us Brit’s, what great timing) Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie unveiled Live Mesh, the 10,000 user beta of some of the ideas talked about at Mix08. In essence this is the start of Microsoft’s journey into cloud computing and ‘Somethng-as-a-Service’ facilities. The beta is now currently full up, but those signed up to will get an XP/Vista client, access to 5gb of online storage, and sync between desktop PC’s and the online ‘Live desktop.’

Currently file and folder sync is available – drop a file in any one device into the live folder and it is shared with all your connected devices. Yes this is replicated by a number of Web 2.0 start-ups, but I don’t expect this to be the only feature in the final version – expect phones, PDA’s, Media Centres and Xboxes to be connected before the end of the year.

My reservation at the moment is that the infrastructure required to make this all work together (ie the backbone of the system) is 100% Microsoft’s. For a true Software-as-a-Service (or any variant of X-as-a-Service) you need true portability of the entire ecosystem – your client, your data and your servers. Of course this is part that Microsoft want you to ignore so they can give the cloud computing benefit while retaining you as a customer so they can monetise you, either through subscriptions or eyeballs on advertising for consumer versions of Live Mash

What I am hoping is that Microsoft are taking a leaf out of the Web 2.0 playbook with an early initial release, and a frequent update and release of new iterations of the software and service, working out from the bare bones service they have now and letting it grow organically to a certain extent. What I don’t want to see is no movement on this for another six months before a release with eight or nine new services and only half the bugs fixed from this first public build.

It is nice that underlying all of this is the power of RSS and XML derived data exchange, which should make it nicely hackable (in the good sense) if they decide to open it up as much as they can. That would be a n interesting move (something for the October Developers Conference maybe?) but the next steps I expect to see, certainly for photos and media, is a client that runs on the Xbox 360, as Redmond start to connect up more devices in the home.

I said at the time “[Microsoft] is in the middle of that handbrake turn, and it has turned course… where it ends up pointing remains to be seen.” Now we have a rough direction.

April 23, 2008; Daily Links, Web 2.0 (News);

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