This morning’s call was all about the Microsoft Live Mesh platform, announced yesterday. Announced at 9 PM last night, Live Mesh is Microsoft’s platform for synchronization and storage on the web. The promise of the Mesh is that you won’t have to care where you are or which device you’re using – your data will always be there. You’ll only have to care about which data you want to share with whom.
#1 It’s a set of applications for synchronizing and storing data in the cloud. You’ll be able to access your data from anywhere. Share it with anyone. And it combines some very cool features of the web (like feeds) to notify you when stuff you care about has been updated. It’s what you’d get if you combined foldershare with an RSS feed in each direction.
#2 It’s a platform for synchronizing and storing data. Or at least that’s how it’s been presented to the outside world. It works with Windows today, but Microsoft promises it will work with everything in the future.
We had a good time picking mesh apart and comparing it to previous Microsoft offerings and to Google’s vision of the world.
Conclusion? While everyone agreed that the vision is compelling, the end user services promising, and the platform expansive, there was still significant mistrust of Microsoft, dating right back to the Passport / Hailstorm days.
On the call: Alec Saunders, Jim Courtney, Randall Howard, Dan York, Neal Saferstein, Jeanette Fisher, Frank Abrams, Brad Jones, Wilhelm Wimmreuter, Adam Somer, and Ian Hood
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
