Comments on: Microsoft's Live Mesh top innovation at the Crunchies

A most surprising and deserving winner at the Crunchies was Microsoft's Live Mesh, which won in the category best technology innovation/achievement.

[goodspeed8701]

Yep it deserve to win. I like the Live mesh.

[slecalvez]

I agree, live mesh is definitely cool and very useful.

[kojacked]

While I really like Chrome (just so damn fast!) I have to say Mesh is by far solving more problems for me on a day-to-day basis. Aside from sync'ing favorites, photos, and software settings between machines I keep finding nifty little uses. Just this week I setup a mesh folder for my scanner's output. I sync that to my work PC and laptop so my kids at home can scan in their homework and ask me questions (via Live Messenger) when they are stuck. I just bought my daughter a laptop/tablet PC and being able to receive the stuff she scans on my PC wirelessly via mesh over WiFi is just amazing.

Also I love never having to sync my phone to pull pictures off of it and then copy them around to my various PCs. I've got the phone's camera output folder setup to sync and when I take a picture it's sent to all of my other PCs. Pretty damn cool.

Now all they have to do is wrap this up into a simplified front-end where Grandma can check boxes for the things she wants to sync and where she wants them sync'ed to (Sorry, granny hardly knows what a folder is; she does know what her stuff like pictures and favorites are though).

The other key is they have to keep pushing for client support. They need to support all of the major OSs and distros, get devices to embed mesh support (i.e. cameras, mp3 players, etc). They have a good start but they have to keep the momentum going. Right now this stuff is greak for geeks but they need to make it great for consumers (and IT guys who don't have a clue) too.

[jhoeforth]

A very cool use of Live Mesh is synchrinized bookmarks. Oftentimes, I stumble interesting links while at work and decides not to read it until I get home. With my bookmarks synchronized both on home and office PC, anything that I bookmark on my office PC automatically available on my Home PC.

[FlutterVertigo]

[[ Sorry, granny hardly knows what a folder is ]]

Perhaps yours. My grandma knows what a folder is. She spends a great deal of time in the computer world. For the most part, she stays within the realm of browser, word pressing, and email.

If I send something to her, it's not long before I get a response. And it's not monosyllabic "ok". She spends time writing a meaningful response.

(aside: My mom is a 3rd grade teacher and leaves a notebook on her desk. If the kids are busy doing something where she doesn't have to be in front or prowling as she watches to see what they are doing, she checks her email. If I really do need to know something, I'll send it to both. If I don't hear from one of them right away, the other one takes care of it.)

Browsing & word processing are for researching family history; but not just the expected genealogy sites.

She has a huge collection of family artifacts and spends time looking through photos which predate her, filling in the gaps of whom each person is, the event, perhaps people who weren't there for some reason (and ordinarily would be), blah-blah-blah. Some of her (other) relatives might be able to fill in some of the blanks, so she usually routes email through their kids or nieces/nephews.

She does take a break at some point. She walks 1-2 miles every day. If the weather isn't all that great, she rides a stationary bike for twenty miles (one ride). She was doing this before she had her knee replacements a few years ago. Her orthopod told her if everyone else was conditioned as well as she is *prior* to the surgery, PT would be non-existent.

Oh, I forgot: she turned ninety-one in November ('08). She's a retired kindergarten teacher.

She sends email to my mom every morning, telling her she made it through another night.

(My mom is sixty-eight and hasn't really considered giving up teaching yet)

Okay, I'm done bragging.

[ppgreat]

I guess I don't understand what the big deal is. I've been doing this for years.

Is this just another case of lowered expectations?

[Drew.0]

The difference between mesh and just syncing folders on your network is quite huge. Among many other features, Mesh offers file sync, remote access to any pc on your mesh from anywhere from mesh.com, sharing across networks and communities with permisson based access, and quite soon an entire application platform that offers multi device sync and nuetrality.
If they stay on this push(which with Ray Ozzie on board is pretty much a given) and actually integrate well with all of there other cloud services(like skydrive) the possibilities are endless.

[actualtiger]

Wow that surprises me, and I voted for Mesh - my money was on Chrome.

MS needs to drive project to the point where it absorbs/ integrates/enables similar MS products such as Live Share, Office Live -- I understand that synching & sharing are not the the same, but I'm not sure our hypothetical granny would be able to differentiate between them. Then there's Office Groove where does it fit

MS's positioning in this space is reminiscent of their position in image/picture/photo processing space, confused, incoherent resulting in little credibility.

[ThomasWhitney]

Integration of these applications will be imperitive over time as the social networking systems and user ports broaden. The concern that's out there on the table is that of digital security.

Check out this URL that paints of picture of where we are on the subject to date:

http://www.justaskgemalto.com

[gne1963]

All this innovation is quite inspiring.
Given the significant number of job openings at large companies:
http://mast-economy.blogspot.com/2009/01/estimate-top-us-firms-have-over-700000.html
it is also quite heartening to see this innovation in the small to medium business realm as well...

[gne1963]

<a href="http://mast-economy.blogspot.com/2009/01/estimate-top-us-firms-have-over-700000.html">Link reference for previous comment</a>

[ThomasWhitney]

I'm betting some of these jobs are going to be in the digital security sector. There is no way that a company of any standing can downsize that.