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 … will not just be another folder ...

  • 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.”