Wednesday, April 30, 2008

...but then again, I couldn't have topped Microsoft anyway.

I've joined Microsoft's Tech Preview of Live Mesh, and although it's very early in the product's life cycle, I'm already getting value from the tool. One of the ideas that a friend and I bantered around last summer was to solve the problem that file synchronization solutions like Groove have in dealing with devices being off line. We wanted to create a synchronization service that would handle the files "in the cloud". The only difference was that we wanted to only store files until they either expired or were pulled down to the devices that were not connected at the time of the original upload. We were being pessimistic about our ability to manage the sale of storage required to support a fully accessible file store for the web.

Regardless of the argument about Microsoft's intentions (does the Mesh support the "cloud" model, or defend against it), they are going to have a hit. To me, the "cloud" model has it's limitations and the local desktop / OS has other problems. Merging the two is what will get people into the cloud way of thinking.

Labels: cloud computing, live mesh, microsoft, web 2.0