Someone sent this link as a “great article about Live Mesh” ... and it was so bad, that I just have to rant about it. Your 9th grade English teacher would have flunked you for this … it’s just a horrible example of the Anguish Languish.

Steve Gillmor has an analogy or a metaphor for everything (and I mean literally every paragraph). Most of them are bad, but some of them are truly awful, so I’m just going to pick on a couple to vent steam.

So it went with Microsoft, as the seeming invulnerability of Gates’ machine accelerated to the boundaries of global saturation. Though we tend to think of Google as the conqueror, the reality is that Microsoft has struggled most with itself, the victim not of decline but of lack of fuel — the very customers who created the megalith in the first place.

The who, did what?
megalith — [noun] ( ‘meh gE “lIth ) 1. a huge stone, esp. one used in prehistoric times as a monument.
First of all, megaliths are erected, not created. Secondly, they don’t use (or lack) fuel. Thirdly, they’re a bad counterpoint to “conquerors.” If you wanted to use that many metaphors in one sentence, you should have said something like this: though we tend to think of Google as the conqueror, the reality is that Microsoft has struggled most with itself, the victim of a decline like that of the Roman empire, and yet Google has still not dared challenge the megalith of Windows, propped up as it is by millions of customers around the world …

The microbigs can seem transcendent like Facebook or possessing the lifetime of a gnat like a thousand forgotten startups or neverwases (sic), but nowhere are the range of possible outcomes more encapsulated than Twitter.

First of all, “can seem transcendent” works, but “can seem possessing the lifetime of a gnat” doesn’t. But more importantly, if Facebook is your example of transcendent, then the “lifetime of a gnat” takes on a whole new meaning — maybe you meant to invoke the branding of Hotmail, or Yahoo!, or SlashDot. Finally, “Neverwases” might be okay in poetry, but isn’t this still a technology magazine?

Yes? Yes. So what you’re saying is that Google is a microbig. Yes, did I say that? No, but I didn’t ask that either and the answer is still yes. Bottom line: Microsoft can’t gain and retain traction with Mesh unless the answers are yes.

What?! Exactly who is he having this conversation with in his head, and why did he write it down on paper?

I hate to ask, but, what is a “Coke Classic question” ... and how did “When’s the Mac version?” get on any list of classic questions? Why are you asking questions without question marks? What is a “Net-grappling” product line? Incidentally, the mental image conjured by combining “flailing” with “grappling” is rather frightening. It’s a no wonder that there are so many comments on this post that say things like “what is he talking about?”

Steve claims that “orthogonal and complementary” is “MicroBig language” (by the way, can we get a little capitalization consistency on your made up words please?) but I’m pretty sure that these are terms usually used by the (it hurts to write this) BigBigs to assuage fears of internal competition, as in: Microsoft’s advertising assets and aQuantive’s complementary expertise… or Yahoo! is complementary to Microsoft and so on. The so-called MicroBigs are usually more concerned with disruptive and revolutionary.

Bah. Anyway.

Microsoft is announcing a big new software + services product and platform this week (well, today, and tomorrow, apparently). It’s called Live Mesh (how much do you suppose mesh.com set them back?) and it’s primarily a synchronization platform — updates shared files across multiple devices (PC, Laptop, handheld, Mac … yes, they said Mac OS X support is coming). They have some of FolderShare in there, and some of Groove and some of FeedSync … initially, this looks like a folder sync and backup service (see their Mesh help files), but it’s designed to become so much more…

At the core is this concept that a single user has a “mesh” of devices, applications, and data that they regularly use. The Mesh Service persists the relationship between these various resources and authorizes access to them … The Mesh Platform means that ultimately, (down the road) customers will license applications and content to their mesh instead of to a specific computer, device, or application. Microsoft actually envisions apps running seamlessly across multiple devices “from the mesh” ... using Remote Desktop and the mesh software to enable that connectivity regardless of your network topology (meaning it can punch through firewalls because you’re running the client software on all the devices). That platform part could really transform the industry if they actually deliver on this cross-platform support for OS X … are they going to deliver a remote desktop server for OS X?

The most interesting part of this platform concept is that they’re trying to extend their OS and Application -based dominance to the web by making the web a part of this “combined experience and storage platform” and trying to reduce the pressure on consumers to choose between local storage and “storage in the cloud.” Thus, an important part of The Mesh Platform is the fact that each mesh object (be it a document, a picture, a song, or a blog post) can be dealt with in different ways on different platforms — so you might have a folder on your computer containing Word documents … which are transformed into blog posts via the mesh and the concept of synchronized feeds. This could revolutionize web development, if it’s done right. Imagine: a mesh object can be a range of cells in an Excel spreadsheet ... which could be published to the web … and edited … and synchronized … and the whole time you have explicit control over the location and custody of the data, and you have built-in support for groups, group memberships, group permissions and ownership, etc.

To sum up … Live Mesh will not just be another folder sync service ...

• The Mesh will deliver more reliable networking by using “the cloud” to relay communications if firewalls intervene.
• The Mesh will allow publish/subscribe (pub/sub) infrastructure for any kind of change notification.
• The Mesh will include “presence” awareness: who’s on, who’s using this, etc.
• The Mesh will provide message-based news events.
• The Mesh will be built on bidirectional “feed” sync with fully authenticated groups.
• The Mesh will work in occasionally connected scenarios.

Am I interested? Maybe … I need to see some licensing and terms of service information which isn’t really available at the moment (since the whole thing is in a closed beta).

Some screenshots of the client portion of Live Mesh are on CNet, and webware has some analysis of the app portion as well — they seem to say that it will will include full Remote Desktop access to a Windows “Live desktop.”