Keeping one’s myriad devices connected and synchronized, with files available on one gadget for everything connected over Microsoft’s Live Mesh, serves as the focus of the company’s new service.
The preview of Live Mesh arrived to much fanfare and enough blogosphere buzz to make anything attached to the Internet vibrate with a low hum. It’s cloud services meets devices, Amit Mital, General Manager of the Live Mesh team, said on the project’s blog.
Though the goal is one of unifying the management of devices, and the files people may want or need to reach when away from a particular machine, Mesh is unashamedly limited in scope. Vista and XP operating systems only may try out the Live Mesh preview.
Mac users need not apply, even though Microsoft like to tout itself as the biggest developer of software for Apple’s OS outside of Apple itself. The Windows-centric strategy leaves out Apple’s iPhone, an odd choice if Microsoft wants to hit the savviest of the tech savvy with Live Mesh.
However, Mary Jo Foley pointed out the architecture of Mesh has support for non-Microsoft technologies, like Cocoa, Flash, and others, available to it. Openness from Microsoft? That’s what could come next.
We’re looking for reasons to be excited here, really. For developers who want to make an application widely available across Windows machines, the Mesh platform provides an API to do so. An app running on Mesh will work the same across devices, Mital wrote.
The real fun should begin the first time an application developer comes up with a way to share rich media files with a Mesh app. Someone with a media center PC who wants to view movies or listen to music stored on that machine on a different computer should be a candidate for that use of Mesh.
We’re thinking there will be an absolute footrace between the MPAA and the RIAA to get to a courthouse and sue the hapless Mesh developer into oblivion. It will not be pretty.
People will want applications to make valuable content available to them per the promise of Mesh, but we need to be convinced it will be any more useful, for developers or everyday users, than creating an app on Facebook’s platform or the Google-backed Open Social.
After all, if someone can email a spreadsheet or other file to themselves at a webmail address, with availability from any browser, where does Mesh improve upon the process?
