Ray Ozzie Meshes Things Up

The services shoes that I spoke of around the MIX 08 conference are starting to drop left and right. Microsoft has begun a technical Beta for the Live Mesh service and put some quite informative videos up on the Web. I've known some of Ray's core team since back in our mutual DEC days (the team started at UIUC earlier, and really coagulated at Iris Associates, the group that did Lotus Notes). Then some of them moved on to Groove and hence to Microsoft. Ray has been doing "sync" for a long time through many generations and refinements of products (at the core of Notes and Groove for sure). Not unexpectedly sync is at the root of Live Mesh (as Ray said would be the case earlier). When I told one of our networking friends he should really take at look at Live Mesh, his answer was "It's just file replication, right?" to suggest his disinterest. It is about file replication. But if you think about it, intelligent file replication is at the core of how we use computers. In Live Mesh you can define a Mesh of devices or people that share specific information. At the simplest you mesh together your computers, phones and MP3 players and share music and photos. In business applications you can collaborate using various forms of documents (IRG runs on Groove collaboration of this form). Notes was a heavyweight structure with high administrative burden. Groove is still pretty heavyweight in terms of the client size but doesn't require any IT admin. Live Mesh is much lighter weight on the client end in part because it's a refined and elegant design and in part because a node in the cloud is a necessary part and the greater complexity can be put there. So in addition to syncing your devices and friends, there is a cloud version that's always up to date and can be accessed via a browser. If you have an application that can run on your PC then it uses a local version of the meshed data and synchronizes it back to the mesh as changes are made (analogous to how modern Outlook cached operation works with Exchange). You can run a PC application in the cloud (they provide a version of .NET Framework that runs in the Live cloud). Or you can write the application in a Web 2.0 mode (more natural for the cloud) and MS supports running it locally on the PC. Very interesting! But wait, there's more. Suppose Microsoft sold a subscription to an up to date Windows and Office "image" and every time you accessed the cloud with one of your computers it was automatically updated with no burden to you (now we have sort of the mōka5 version). Or if you merge it with what MS is doing with SoftGrid (a strong part of the desktop virtualization portfolio) it becomes applications on demand. It's all just file replication but if you do file replication elegantly (as Groove certainly does) it is way cool technology.