The Microsoft Stack: Sharing Comes Together Under 'Live Mesh' Banner

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AS OF 9/8/2008 2:53AM EST

The Microsoft Stack: Sharing Comes Together Under 'Live Mesh' Banner
By Patrick Hynds

June 1, 2008 — When I first heard that Ray Ozzie would be the new chief software architect at Microsoft when Bill Gates moved on to do his philanthropy, I wondered whether Ray would stay the course, fail miserably or bring something better. After the TechEd keynote in Boston back in 2006, I thought that the odds of things going awry were a bit higher, but I am now starting to believe in him.

Ray has a reputation for getting “it,” even if he can’t always communicate that “it” in a lively way. It is only with the recent announcement of Live Mesh that I think we really are seeing what this man can do for the largest software company in the world; namely, help them understand that the PC is the foundation, not the whole house.

Live Mesh is a recently announced technology that is available during the tech preview to a limited group on Vista and XP SP2, with mobile and other devices to follow soon. I had a chance to talk to Jeff Hansen, general manager of services marketing, about the new platform, and it is clear that this is not a rehash or replacement to Instant Messenger, though it does leverage it in some places.

Live Mesh aims to do four primary things: make devices work together via the Internet, give you access to information and news, enable Simple Sharing, and enable you to get anywhere access to your information via various sharing scenarios.

I find that I can’t live without the Internet, and the things I need are on devices (often ones I don’t have with me when I need them). The scenarios this enables could really change resource allocation because it includes things like printers.

Imagine you are on a PDA and want to print to your home or office printer. With Live Mesh your printer can participate over the Web. A more useful device to enlist might be a fax so I can fax from my PDA without a dedicated fax server. Hansen said, “Administrators might innovate by using the Live Mesh to help with remote deployments or many other business scenarios as they might discover them,” so really it will be up to us to help shape how we leverage this platform.

One of the first questions I had was what does this mean to the network and the life of the network manager? Since Live Mesh uses HTTP as the communications protocol, you won’t be getting requests to open up your firewall (a lesson learned). Once I understood the features and goals I started to see Live Mesh as a platform focused on the Web. As you know, an operating system helps you deal with components that are not made by the same vendors more easily (at least that's the idea).

In that regard, I think of Live Mesh as playing the role of an operating system between the user and the Web. That is a tall order and not an expressed goal, but that is where I hope this technology takes us. One of the things that makes me hopeful is that there is a lot of flexibility already designed into Live Mesh. The data-from-anywhere model can be set to be multi-master or to run as a centralized hub model. Essentially that means you can select whether your data is shared peer-to-peer (think Outlook cached mode) or in the cloud.

Another thing I immediately thought would be cool would be to expose my calendar, so that when I need someone else to see my calendar to schedule something, I can make it a self-service tool rather than me having to give them a list of available times.

One scenario would be where I need a package delivered to me and it requires a signature. I would want to be able to share light schedule data with the shipper (by light data I mean when I am available, but not what I am doing when I am busy). The shipper would offer to deliver the package during one of my designated free spots, and I could confirm with a single click. This isn’t in the tech preview or even on the roadmap for Live Mesh, but if it gets the traction it might then we can reasonably expect the ecosystem to build this and other compelling applications.

Eventually, you could probably expect things like the Zune, Xbox and even Sync to have a client (nothing firm, but nothing ruled out either). I am not sure if there will be an iPhone client anytime soon, but if the initiative is successful, I wouldn’t bet against it.

Patrick Hynds, president of CriticalSites and a Microsoft Regional Director, can be reached at phynds@criticalsites.com.

Related Search Term(s): Desktop management, mobile development

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