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A New App Platform

Live Mesh has the potential to become a platform that will tie together all of Microsoft’s online storage, file management, synchronization and sharing services, along with other third-party services that care to use its API for integration.

• By Peter Varhol
• 08/01/2008

Microsoft as a corporation has never embraced the Web. The company that came of age during the PC revolution and provides the vast majority of desktop computer operating systems has never felt particularly comfortable thinking beyond the box. Certainly, under the direction of Bill Gates and others, it has successfully built applications that work with the Internet, but those applications are ultimately bound to the individual computer, or at best a limited number of computers on a well-defined network.

Microsoft Live Mesh continues that tradition, but it redefines both the network and the box. It's bound firmly to devices, even as it uses the Web as its transport mechanism. What it does is provide a mechanism for integrating content from one application or Web site to other apps or sites. And it's intended to work beyond PCs and Web sites; I can post a photo taken with my phone on my Facebook page, for example.

Microsoft launched Live Mesh earlier this year with a splash, adding to the stable of announcements that support the company's Software plus Services strategy.

Developer Connection
So what does this initiative have to do with developers? Live Mesh is actually a connectivity platform, with applications required to provide functionality on that platform. Microsoft previously offered the platform and some development tools as a community technology preview through its Connect program, although it was a limited offering that's now filled.

Think of Live Mesh as a kind of operating system, one that's designed to identify data contained in a file structure, move that data around the network and position it in different perspectives on different devices. Like any operating system, it provides not only low-level services but also a way for applications to access those services. Microsoft is planning to offer this operating system as a part of its Live service, so the API resides "in the cloud," so to speak. However, your application can be anywhere.

Integration Solution
Live Mesh proposes to solve a real problem that has been with us for many years. We've always had trouble moving files between different systems for specific purposes. Networks eased much of that problem in the 1990s, but we were still faced with moving files of one format into applications of another. Microsoft has come up with some awkward ways of moving certain things between Office files -- most notoriously the Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technique -- but in general, it's not possible to open one application's file format with another application.

And the problem is much more acute and complex today. If we add social networks into the mix, we discover that there are a large number of different types of files we'd like to group together and make available as one for friends and colleagues. And it would be great if those files could organize and display themselves according to the protocols of the target device. Perhaps we might want to look up a caller on our mobile phone on LinkedIn, and an application can send pertinent LinkedIn information back to the phone screen as we're talking.

Platform Potential
Live Mesh has the potential to become a platform that will tie together all of Microsoft's online storage, file management, synchronization and sharing services, along with other third-party services that care to use its API for integration. Just like Windows and the third-party developer community that surrounds that platform, a similar community will eventually coalesce around Live Mesh.

Today, however, Live Mesh is clearly nowhere near ready for prime time. In fact, some cynics might be inclined to describe it as vaporware that will never see the light of day. It wouldn't be the first time that Microsoft has made announcements of intent and then abruptly changed direction before shipping a finished product.

But the concept is clearly one whose time has come, whether from Microsoft or from someone else. It's at least possible that the next killer application will come out of a platform that's similar to Live Mesh.

Additionally, it refocuses attention to the PC, but in a larger sense, to the devices that are difficult or kludgy to connect to the PC today. Like any platform, it won't do anything without applications. That's where we as developers come in.

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