As Microsoft is ramping up its cloud story it seems that Live Mesh is starting to be positioned as one of the key elements. For example, now the Mesh framework got renamed to just Live Framework – quite a promotion unless there’s something else added in there.

I am quite skeptical about the technology and here’s why:

So the Live Mesh project has two components: an application for file (and other data in the future) synchronization and a set of APIs other developers can use. Let’s have a look at both of them.

The Live Mesh application (as I mentioned in my other blog, and as Joel also noticed) is just another version of Groove. Groove was a team collaboration product with brilliant underlying synchronization architecture which allowed aid agencies to effectively communicate in regions like Africa or Afghanistan. However, it never really got into mainstream.

We recently discussed the reasons why with Ilia from SharePoint-Recovery.com and came to the conclusion that for mainstream users it makes much more sense to exchange emails for ad-hoc communications and connect to SharePoint sites for project-related stuff than to set up Groove and communicate within the Groove spaces. Is Live Mesh much different from that? Not really. It has a web UI so you can access the data without installing the client – but does that make it radically different? Is it again falling somewhere in-between email/file uploading site and real team portals? If that will be the case I am not sure this second attempt will be any better than the first one (i.e. Groove).

Live Framework about which we will soon learn more is presumably the underlying APIs for data synchronization across devices and with some offline capabilities. Is that a big deal? Offline is a big deal but not for data only – people want to have the whole web applications offline and Google’s Gears or Adobe’s AIR seem to be addressing the need in a much more comprehensive manner.

I can sort of see how I could use generic data synchronization in my applications but from what I have heard so far (PDC might change it all) it seems to have too many limitations: client download is required (and I have not heard of redistributable version or in-browser implementation) and Live ID needs to be used to authenticate (if that’s the case the system will never take off outside Microsoft – just imagine Google requiring gmail account to access a mesh-up with Google Maps – there would have been 0 of them on the net.)

Will Live Framework repeat the fate of another cool technology which never found a valid application – WinFS?

Microsoft obviously has much more cloud-related stuff which they will start sharing even more in a few weeks. But so far they seem to be producing a lot of isolated over-engineered solutions which do not make up a convincing story. Let’s see if in a few weeks we will have a completely new perspective on their efforts.

Tags: Adobe AIR, APIs, Cloud Computing, Google Gears, Groove, Live, Live Framework, Live Mesh, Microsoft, PDC
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