Microsoft Mesh… Maybe?
During those dark days when my blog was down Microsoft launched the tech preview of their Live Mesh platform. Much blogging ensued. Scott said, and to a pretty good point I agree, that Mesh embodied everything that is wrong with Microsoft. By taking an idea, and building and building and building it into some overly complex, difficult to explain beast that can’t support itself.
A lot of the reporting has been generally neutral to negative. Steven breaks down the misconceptions.
Now I went through a lot of emotions around Mesh, I know, I know, what can I say, I’m an emotional guy. I cried alligator tears when Goose didn’t make it, don’t try and play like you didn’t. Moving on, when Mesh was just a rumor I was really curious to see what they’d do in the space and when it was announced I was seriously disappointed. At a time when Amazon’s building their AWS out like crazy and Google was launching AppEngine, Microsoft comes out with a sync system? Then I was annoyed, why is this so ridiculous? Why is Microsoft so dumb? Finally, though, I kind of came around on it.
See recently I’ve been on a kick, I want to get all my stuff synced up everywhere, n’sync, if you will. I want my calendars and my contacts and my todo lists and everything sync’d at my desktop, iPhone and in the cloud at the service of my choice. Simple right? No. I was searching and finding Spanning Sync to do some of it, but not the rest, Plaxo pulse, again some of it, etc. I still can’t two way sync my Google contacts list with my desktop. Apparently syncing is a pain in the ass.
Here’s where, I think, Mesh steps in. It acts as, to steal a concept, a syncing virtual machine. An intermediate form, an abstraction layer. So if you are a service, say Google Calendar or Remember the Milk or what have you, you just need to write an interface that two way syncs you to the Mesh in some pleasant form. On Mesh all calendars look like Mesh calendars and all todo lists look like Mesh todo lists and I can just sync that all to my Desktop and my iPhone and my washing machine.
I think as we have more and more sophisticated stuff being developed, this could be a very useful setup. All this is not to say that I think Mesh is a slam dunk, very far from it. Not because there’s no mac or linux version or because it’s just a file sync’ing platform now - all that is easily fixed. Microsoft shows its weakness with its inability to explain it to people, partially exacerbated by launching with so little in the way of different examples of how they envision this going. Creating generic intermediate forms that work for most is also a daunting process (see the NewsML behemoth as an example). And with all the lack of anyone really talking about it right now, I wonder if it will get the developer momentum it needs.
What do you think? Is Mesh the future? Or just another Microsoft mess.
