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Analysis
Convergence Idea Gets Serious with Live Mesh, Analysts Say
4/29/2008
Analyst reaction last week to Redmond's "Live Mesh" initiative can be deciphered in one of two ways. On the one hand, it's an old idea, namely "convergence," with new buzzwords. On the other, it means that industry leader Microsoft has become serious about playing hard ball with its more nimble competitors, working to simplify the end user experience in a Web 2.0 era.
As it turns out, it's a little bit of both.
"Conceptually, Live Mesh sounds an awful lot like HailStorm (.NET My Services) in concept -- a way to access your data from any device with an Internet connection," said Matt Rosoff, lead analyst for consumer products and corporate announcements at Kirkland, Wash.-based independent think tank Directions on Microsoft. "That idea was floated by Microsoft back in 2000, and was the subject of considerable work before they scrapped it for various reasons -- lack of a clear business model and partner model being the main ones in my opinion."
But this week seems a little different, experts say. Led by Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, the software giant came out in full force highlighting a new convergence model that would build a comprehensive Web services platform structured around a processing environment that splices together what Ozzie calls the "Three Cs: content, commerce and community."
It's another part of the company's "software plus services" approach, with an emphasis on data accessibility through synchronization.
"In other words," Rosoff said, "sync is a problem if you believe that you need that data on all your devices so you can take advantage of their local processing power. A 'pure' SaaS [software as a service] proponent would ask, 'Why can't I just keep data in the cloud all the time and access it via a browser?'"
David Wertheimer, executive director of the University of Southern California's Entertainment Technology Center, called the announcement a "dramatic one for Microsoft." Wertheimer has been studying methods, practices and technologies pertaining to such "anytime, anywhere" content models.
"The key question here is can a large company like Microsoft, long known for proprietary and relatively closed technologies, truly embrace a world that's about openness and lack of control?"
Wertheimer further posits that this idea has been around since the dawn of the World Wide Web, when Sun Microsystems first proclaimed that the "computer is the network."
"What Microsoft is realizing is that they can't stop what's going on," he added. "Google is everywhere but you won't find a single physical tangible product with their name on it other than in the virtual space. And I think, rightly so, that Microsoft is going to leverage its very smart engineers and intellectual capital to make sure that their strength, a powerful OS that developers can build applications on, is played up."
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