Beyond Binary

Blockbuster and Microsoft are working together on an effort to use Live Mesh as a means to give consumers a way to reach their video content from a variety of devices.

A Microsoft representative said on Monday that Microsoft's Live Services team is working with Blockbuster on "building some demo Mesh apps."

It's the latest tie-up between the companies. Blockbuster is already one of the early customers for Microsoft's Exchange Online hosted e-mail service.

Live Mesh debuted in April, but at the time was largely limited to PC and Web file synchronization. However, Microsoft said at the time it launched Live Mesh that it would be opened to third parties to write their own Web-based and PC-based applications. Microsoft did just that at its Professional Developers Conference.

The Dallas Morning News has more details on the effort, including a line on just how far the company hopes to take things.

"Eventually, we'll give customers instant access to any movie on any device with an Internet connection and a screen," Blockbuster Chief Information Officer Keith Morrow told the paper. "More immediately, we could use this technology to reach into airports. Travelers could quickly download movies from Blockbuster kiosks to their portable media players."

LOS ANGELES--While it was Windows Azure that got much of the attention, Microsoft also released another important platform at this week's Professional Developers Conference.

Microsoft's Live Framework is essentially the developer piece of Live Mesh. It's what lets developers use the mesh technology to add online components to their desktop applications, or conversely, to give online applications an offline component.

The software maker had said that this would be coming when it unveiled Live Mesh this spring, but its actual launch was somewhat overshadowed by the discussion of Windows Azure on Monday. The Live Framework is itself built on top of Windows Azure, but exists one layer up from the core operating system, using Microsoft's prebuilt layers for things like contact management and other services.

As with Azure, the Live Framework is at an early stage. Microsoft at this point is mainly hoping that developers start experimenting with the tools, as opposed to building broadscale programs.

'"It's not ready for shipping a production app," Corporate Vice President David Treadwell said in an interview this week.

Microsoft did show several concept applications at the PDC, including efforts from Blockbuster and BBC, which showed a version of its iPlayer that used Mesh to help people see what programs their friends were watching.

As for which Microsoft applications will be mesh-enabled, Microsoft has not said a ton. Treadwell did say that Windows Live Wave 4, the release after this fall's update, will feature components of the mesh technology.

"We're working on integrating with the next major release of Windows Live," he said.

Neither Treadwell nor Windows Live general manager Brian Hall would give many more details, though when I suggested a mesh-ified version of Windows Live Photo Gallery might be in the works, Treadwell said "That's the class of thing that we're pondering."

Live Mesh, meanwhile, is shifting this week from a technology preview to a full-fledged beta, adding native support for Macs and Windows Mobile phones, among other new features.

Microsoft is also opening up the identity component for the Live Framework, meaning developers won't necessarily have to use Microsoft's Live ID to take advantage of other mesh components. Microsoft got a fair bit of attention at the show for its cooperation with Live ID, but it also said it will allow businesses to handle their own credentials, using Active Directory.

"The Microsoft Services Connector lets businesses take advantage of Live services, while letting the business use its active directory to handle authentication," Treadwell said.

Provided businesses can make sure only employees have access, Treadwell said, many are deciding it's OK for the data to live outside the firewall. "People are opening up to that."

Some businesses at the PDC also expressed interest in perhaps having their own storage piece used as well--something Microsoft will have to sort out for Live Framework.

It's been a busy week for Microsoft and I wanted to briefly note some other items that are making headlines elsewhere.

First of all, Microsoft says it is helping the London Stock Exchange investigate what cased a massive trading meltdown on Monday. ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley notes that Microsoft is among a small list of major tech providers to the exchange, a list that also includes HP and Accenture.

Foley and Microsoft blogger Long Zheng also both have items on Live Mesh apps. Foley notes that creating Mesh Apps is some of what Ray Ozzie's Startup Labs team has been up to, while Zheng posts a look at a demo Mesh app Microsoft created for making to-do lists.

We're clearly going to hear more about Mesh apps at the October Professional Developer Conference, where Microsoft is expected to release tools to let outsiders create their own Live Mesh programs. I don't think its any surprise that Microsoft is going to want to have some programs out of the gate that show consumers and developers that it is something worth spending their time on.

Meanwhile the good folks at Liveside.net take note of an update to Photosynth as well as spotting a new Microsoft beta: Microsoft Phone Data Manager, which helps synchronize contacts with certain (particularly Windows Mobile) cell phones.

Microsoft's Live Mesh hasn't officially expanded to include Macs just yet, but the software maker has said that folks in more countries can now take part without having to wait for an invitation.

In a blog posting, Microsoft announced that folks in Canada, India, and Ireland can now join. Microsoft had already opened things up in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

Live Mesh is intended to be a service, over time, that allows cloud-based applications to have desktop components and takes desktop applications into the cloud as well as allowing synchronization among many different devices. For now, though, Live Mesh is primarily a means of synchronizing data across multiple computers.

Several times a link has popped up on Microsoft's site for an early Mac version of the Live Mesh client, although Microsoft has promptly taken down the public links.

Although folks in Canada, India, and Ireland don't need an invite, Microsoft said that there is still a cap for each geography, so those interested might not want to dally too long. The company is expected to broaden testing of Live Mesh ahead of its October Professional Developers Conference, with the service expected to expand to include new features at that point.

The Live Mesh team also posted an interesting blog last week on some of the limits in the current service. For example, individual files can be no larger than 2GB, while the size of all contents in a Live Folder can be up to 10GB. (There's still a 5GB limit for how much data can be stored in the cloud-based Live Desktop.)

It just got a little easier to get into Ray Ozzie's cloud.

Microsoft has opened up its Live Mesh service to anyone who has (or signs up for) a Windows Live ID. The service, announced in April, lets people share data among multiple Windows computers, as well as over the Web.

The vision for Live Mesh is broader--envisioning people sharing data among Macs, PCs, and various devices, as well as opening up the possibility for desktop applications to add online components, and Web apps to add offline components. For now, though, it's largely about file sync.

Microsoft is expected to add more features by its Professional Developer Conference in October.

In any case, Microsoft had been limiting Live Mesh sign-ups to those with an invitation, but now it's open to anyone who wants to see it in its early stages.

The change was noted by Microsoft in its Live Mesh forums and spotted by Windows Live enthusiast site Liveside.Net.

"The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that anyone in the U.S. can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID," Microsoft said.

Oddly, it also told international users they could get into the act by spoofing their systems into appearing to be U.S. machines and then gave instructions on how to do so. That seems an odd choice to me. But hey, there you have it.

"Please be aware that this may cause other applications that specifically require your native country region and language settings to encounter problems," Microsoft cautioned.

After getting into the limited beta for Microsoft's Live Mesh, blogger Long Zheng wanted to find a way to share the opportunity.

It turns out that each person who gets added to the beta gets to invite a few others, by sharing files with them.

"As soon as I got my own invite, I started thinking of the original 'Gmail invite sharing' Web site and began to build one for Live Mesh," Zheng said on his Istartedsomething blog. "Thus, www.sharemesh.com was born. If you would like a Live Mesh invite or have one to share, I encourage you to check it out."

So far, more than 190 invitations have been shared via the site. Some 1,400 people have registered seeking invitations.

Microsoft announced a beta of Live Mesh at last week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, but said the test would be limited initially to about 10,000 testers. The company said it expects to continue adding testers, with plans for a broad beta this fall.

SAN FRANCISCO--The launch of Live Mesh this week offers the clearest understanding yet of what Microsoft's Windows Live Platform group has been working on for the last two years.

And yet, Live Mesh is just the tip of the iceberg. It's only one of the projects that 400 or so people are working on in Microsoft's Live Platform group.

"Mesh is a big part of the platform; it is not the entire platform," David Treadwell, the vice president in charge of the group, said in an interview at the Web 2.0 Expo 2008 here.

Trying to make sense of that platform is no easy task, however. Treadwell said he likes to think of the Live components as falling into three categories. At the top layer are finished services, things like Windows Live Hotmail or Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Below that is the area Treadwell focuses on--platform services. That includes things like Live Mesh as well as the core contacts and messaging engine as well as Live ID authentication. About 100 of the 400 or so people working in Treadwell's group are devoted to Live Mesh.

Microsoft's Live Mesh is but one part of the company's overall Live plan.

(Credit: Microsoft)

At the deepest level are a set of basic utility computing services--things like computation and storage. Today, only Microsoft uses its data centers in this way, but Treadwell suggested that will change.

"Today it's just Microsoft," he said. "We're not going to talk about future plans but there is a lot of opportunity at that layer."

To offer an analogy, Treadwell suggested that the utility computing piece is akin to the hardware and Windows kernel on the desktop, while the platform services piece is similar to the Win32 application programming interfaces. Finished services are similar to applications.

I also talked with Treadwell about all the things that are on his "to do" list with Live Mesh--adding support for more devices, opening it up to developers, making it enterprise-friendly and, last but not least, coming up with a business model to pay for things.

There wasn't a whole lot new on the device front--Macs and Windows Mobile are next up, but no firm timetable. There should be a software development kit in time for this year's Professional Developers Conference.

"We should have a pretty solid set of stuff directly useful to developers," he said.

On the corporate front, Treadwell reiterated that although the Live Mesh technology preview is not necessary enterprise-friendly, the final product will be. For example, businesses that want employees' Mesh documents to stay on their own servers will be able to do so.

"Most companies will want to be careful about where their private data is stored," he said. Likewise, businesses may want more security in place around the remote desktop feature. Once you are connected to a machine, you have full access to anything that machine can do."

On the business model front, Treadwell insisted that Microsoft is itself still figuring that out. He did add that there is a financial benefit to Microsoft just in making the prospect of making it simpler and more attractive for people to own more devices and multiple PCs.

"We're looking at other ways to have a business model," he said. In addition to subscription and advertising, he also mentioned the possibility of including Mesh as part of a higher-end license for some of Microsoft's other products.

For years, Microsoft has maintained that the PC is the center of the digital home and office.

But Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Tuesday that it's time for the company to acknowledge a new reality.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect

(Credit: Microsoft)

"Over the past 10 years, the PC era has given way to an era in which the Web is at the center of our experiences--experiences delivered not just through the browser but also through many different devices including PCs, phones, media players, game consoles, set-top boxes and televisions, cars, and more," Ozzie said in a memo to be sent to employees on Wednesday (PDF).

In the memo, Ozzie outlines three principles to guide the company in this new era. Chief among those is the notion that "the Web is the hub of our social mesh and our device mesh." The notion of a Mesh is one that Ozzie has been working on for some time and has culminated in the Live Mesh service that Microsoft detailed on Tuesday.

He notes that this transformation has been a challenging one for Microsoft to embrace.

"More than two years ago when I wrote the memo entitled The Internet Services Disruption, much of the company was still focused on bringing our Office 2007 and Vista products to market," Ozzie said. "Aside from MSN, IE/IIS and our tools groups, it was truly 'software', not 'services', that was top of mind."

But, he said, "since then, we've made tremendous progress in our expansion toward 'software+services'--from the long-term quests we've undertaken and customer scenarios we now envision, to the great services and service-enhanced software we've begun to bring to market, and the amazing projects at various stages within our development pipeline."

In the memo Ozzie describes the software+services future as a merging of desktop, mobile and the Web data and devices, orchestrated through Live Mesh:

Office Live will bring Office to the web, and the web to Office. We will deliver new and expanded productivity experiences that build upon the device mesh vision to extend productivity scenarios seamlessly across the PC, the web, and mobile devices. Individuals will seamlessly enjoy the benefits of each - the rich, dynamic editing of the PC, the mobility of the phone, and the work-anywhere ubiquity of the web.

Ozzie indicates that the social graph--the relationships among people--will be part of what Live Mesh handles:

The web is first and foremost a mesh of people. Elements of this social mesh will be a first-class attribute of most all software and service experiences, as the "personal" of the PC meets the "inter-personal" of the web.

He stops short of specifically hooking Silverlight--Microsoft's cross-platform, cross-browser rich Internet application technology that competes with Adobe AIR-- into the Live Mesh experience, but the combination of the two brings Microsoft beyond its Windows-centric heritage.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The question for me is not how far Ozzie's thinking has evolved, but just how far his vision has spread within the company and where the pockets of resistance lie. In his latest memo he talks about this new world order affecting every area of the company, from Windows to developer tools to entertainment devices. That means he's going to need a whole lot of people to buy in to his philosophy for the vision to be made real.

Following is the full text of Ozzie's memo:

Over the past decade our lives, our businesses, and our society have been transformed by the web.

In its early days the web grew through the explosion of information portals as gateways to content, marketplaces for commerce, and communications tools such as email, IM and newsgroups that drove a sense of community on the internet. Over time, the significance of these "3 Cs" -- content, commerce, and community -- has expanded tremendously, growing in ways through which they've become intermixed and mutually reinforcing.

Content has changed at both the "head" and the "tail". The line between editorialized portals and blogs has blurred, and all are consumed through feeds. Beyond news, movies and music and television have all expanded to embrace the web. And the interrelation of content and community has created a world of "social media", where both head and tail content is intrinsically social by virtue of community linking, tagging, and ranking. Relationships and collective behavioral intelligence have changed how we stay informed, find and share media, and interact with one another.

Commerce on the web has moved well beyond the early online shopping cart. Nowadays, community is impacting commerce in dramatic ways. Head retailers such as Amazon utilize community extensively for recommendations, reviews, and wish lists. Tail commerce websites such as Craigslist utilize community extensively for conversation around local products. And Search has completely transformed online commerce. It's an essential utility for how we research, how we shop, and how we buy on the web. It's also become an essential mechanism for how we market on the web, and increasingly for how we sell on the web.

Community on the web once meant "group communications", largely through rudimentary tools such as email, IM and IRC, message boards and newsgroups. Today, the action has shifted toward using composite communications tools and platforms that mash together content, applications and commerce, all within the context of group interaction. These social platforms are altering the way we connect and coordinate, establish identity and affinities, and build reputation. While this notion of composite communications is most prominently demonstrated in how we use profile-centric consumer social networking tools, such as Facebook, the social platform is also finding its way into the workplace in the form of increasingly rich workspaces, both real-time and asynchronous, that integrate communications and content relevant to a project or a team.

As the "3 Cs" have evolved, so has the significance of online advertising as the economic engine powering our world of services. With growth projected from $40B today to $80B in the next three years, online advertising will continue to be the primary monetization mechanism for consumer services on the web. As advertising transitions more and more to being digital, measurable, and competitively bid, the "ad platform" is key. The advertising ecosystem surrounding this platform is reliant upon the continuous innovation of publishers and developers, whose interesting and engaging properties capture users' time and attention and ultimately serve to match advertisers with a relevant audience. Continuous innovation in such high-engagement products and services, in each area of the "3 Cs", will continue to provide the fuel to drive the advertising-based economic model.

Given this context, it's strategic that we invest broadly in solutions and partnerships that advance our position in current and future generations of content, community, commerce, and search, and also in an advertising platform that's attractive to advertisers, publishers and developers.

But while innovation in the "3 Cs", search and ads is essential for success in services targeting consumers on the web, their impact barely scratches the surface of the much broader effect that internet services innovation will have on individuals, businesses, and developers.

Indeed Microsoft's overall services strategy encompasses all of these areas: services for the individual, services for business, and services for developers. The intent of this memo is to map out that all-up strategy. I'll outline three principles that guide our work, and describe how those principles are woven into our myriad software and services offerings.

Central to this strategy is our embrace of both a world of the web and a world of devices. Over the past ten years, the PC era has given way to an era in which the web is at the center of our experiences - experiences delivered not just through the browser but also through many different devices including PCs, phones, media players, game consoles, set-top boxes and televisions, cars, and more.

It is our mission in this new era to create compelling, seamless experiences that combine the power of the internet, with the magic of software, across a world of devices.

Guiding Principles

There are three overarching principles guiding our services strategy - principles informing the design and development of products being implemented across all parts of Microsoft, for both individuals and business.

1. The Web is the Hub of our social mesh and our device mesh.

The web is first and foremost a mesh of people. Elements of this social mesh will be a first-class attribute of most all software and service experiences, as the "personal" of the PC meets the "inter-personal" of the web. Whether in work, play, or just life, the social element of software will continue to transform the ways that we interact with people with whom we have some affinity. All applications will grow to recognize and utilize the inherent group-forming aspects of their connection to the web, in ways that will become fundamental to our experiences. In scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment, social mesh notions of linking, sharing, ranking and tagging will become as familiar as File, Edit and View.

We're also living in a world where the number and diversity of devices is on the rise; not just PCs and phones, but TVs, game consoles, digital picture frames, DVRs, media players, cameras and camcorders, home servers, home automation systems, our car's entertainment and navigation systems, and more. To individuals, the concept of "My Computer" will give way to the concept of a personal mesh of devices -- a means by which all of your devices are brought together, managed through the web, as a seamless whole. After identifying a device as being "yours", its configuration and personalization settings, its applications and their own settings, and the data it carries will be seamlessly available and synchronized across your mesh of devices. Whether for media, control or access, scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment will be unified and enhanced by the concept of a device mesh.

2. The Power of "Choice" as business moves to embrace the cloud.

Most major enterprises are in the early stages of a significant infrastructural transition -- from the use of dedicated and sometimes very expensive application servers, to the use of virtualization and commodity hardware to consolidate those enterprise applications on computing and storage grids constructed within their data center. This trend will accelerate as enterprise applications are progressively re-factored from a centralized "scale up" model to the horizontal "scale out" requirements of this new utility computing model.

Driven in large part by the high-scale requirements of consumer services, the value of this utility computing model is most clearly evident in cloud-based internet services. By extension, cloud-based enterprise utility computing, infrastructure services, and enterprise applications are all becoming a reality, affording IT a range of new choices in how to deploy solutions across and between enterprises; within their own data center, in a partner's hosting facility, or with the vendor itself in the cloud. Software built explicitly to provide a significant level of server/service symmetry will enable IT to balance factors such as cost and control, and to leverage the skills of its key personnel most effectively. It will afford choice and flexibility in developing, operating, migrating and managing such systems in highly varied enterprise deployment environments that are distributed and federated between the enterprise data center and the internet cloud.

3. Small Pieces Loosely Joined for developers, within the cloud and across a world of devices.

Application design patterns at both the front- and back-end are transitioning toward being compositions and in some cases loose federations of cooperating systems, where standards and interoperability are essential. At the front-end, lightweight REST-based technologies have become ubiquitous, in some cases augmenting their WS-* counterparts, in integrating a broad variety of components combined seamlessly for the user at the surface of the browser. RSS and ATOM feeds have become lightweight channels and queues between software components. Declarative languages such as XAML have enabled rapid UI innovation and iteration.

At a higher level, myriad options exist for delivering applications to the user: The web browser, unique in its ubiquity; the PC, unique in how it brings together interactivity/experience, mobility and storage; the phone, unique in its extreme mobility. Developers will need to build applications that can be delivered seamlessly across a loosely coupled device mesh by utilizing a common set of tools, languages, runtimes and frameworks -- a common toolset that spans from the service in the cloud to enterprise server, and from the PC to the browser to the phone.

At the back-end, developers will need to contend with new programming models in the cloud. Whether running on an enterprise grid, or within the true utility computing environment of cloud-based infrastructure, the way a developer will write code, deploy it, debug it, and maintain it will be transformed. The cloud-based environment consists of vast arrays of commodity computers, with storage and the programs themselves being spread across those arrays for scale and redundancy, and loose coupling between the tiers. Independent developers and enterprises alike will move from "scale up" to "scale out" back-end design patterns, embracing this model for its cost, resiliency, flexible capacity, and geo-distribution.

Transformation of our Offerings

Successful experiences on the web are those that are organically compelling, highly engaging, and viral across their intended audience. By applying our three principles consistently across all the markets we serve, we have an opportunity to reshape our offerings for individuals, businesses, and developers, and to deliver a broad range of compelling scenarios.

CONNECTED DEVICES - We aspire to bring together Windows, Windows Live, and Windows Mobile by creating seamless experiences that span these offerings. Windows Live, for example, enables seamless communications and media experiences across Windows, Windows Mobile, and the Web. Live Mesh, a new services platform technology that will also become part of Windows Live, further extends the Windows / Windows Mobile / Windows Live experience by bringing your devices together to work in concert with one another using the web as a hub, enabling:

Unified Device Management - Users will register their devices through a simple, web-based service. Once a part of a user's device mesh, whenever they happen to connect to the internet the devices "report in" to the service -- e.g. for status, health, location, and to exchange/synchronize information. Mesh-aware device configuration/personalization will be done through the web, and full remote control of a device (e.g. remote desktop) will be available from anywhere.

Unified Application Management - Installation and management of "mesh-aware" applications on any or all devices, along with their application settings and data, will be simple and transparent for the user. Individuals will now enjoy the centralized cross-device purchase/deployment experience formerly available only within the enterprise environment.

Unified Data Management - Folders and files (e.g. documents and media) will be automatically synchronized and made available across any or all devices, as well as through the web. Because every folder can now have an extended web presence, even PC-based documents and media can now have a social mesh element to them.

CONNECTED ENTERTAINMENT - Building upon our device mesh vision, our aspiration is that individuals will only need to license media once, organize their subscriptions and collections once, and use any of their mesh-connected devices to access and enjoy their media - from the living room to the desktop to their pockets. And building upon our social mesh vision being interwoven into everything we do, each individual will be afforded a media-centric or gaming-centric web presence through which they can express their tastes/interests/affinities and interact with others through linking, sharing, ranking and tagging of music, video, photos, games, and more. This vision is being realized today through the Zune Social for media and Xbox LIVE for gaming. Services such as the MSN.com home page, MSN Mobile, MSN Video, Zune Marketplace and software such as Windows Mobile, Microsoft Mediaroom and Windows Media Center will be progressively transformed by this connected entertainment vision.

CONNECTED PRODUCTIVITY - Office Live will bring Office to the web, and the web to Office. We will deliver new and expanded productivity experiences that build upon the device mesh vision to extend productivity scenarios seamlessly across the PC, the web, and mobile devices. Individuals will seamlessly enjoy the benefits of each - the rich, dynamic editing of the PC, the mobility of the phone, and the work-anywhere ubiquity of the web. Office Live will also extend the PC-based Office into the social mesh, expanding the classic notion of "personal productivity" into the realm of the "inter-personal" through the linking, sharing and tagging of documents. Individuals will have a productivity centric web presence where they can work and productively interact with others. This broadly extended vision of Office is being realized today through Office Mobile and Office Live Workspace on the web, augmented by SharePoint, Exchange, and OCS for the connected enterprise.

CONNECTED BUSINESS - We will extend the benefits of high-scale cloud-based infrastructure and services to enterprises, in a way that gives them choice and flexibility in intermixing on-premises deployment, partner hosting, or cloud-based service delivery. Businesses large and small will benefit from services that make it easy to dynamically connect and collaborate with partners and customers, using the web to enable a business mesh. Business customers of all sizes will benefit from web-based business services. This vision is being realized today through the likes of Office Live Small Business. For enterprises, our new Microsoft Online Services provide managed, service-based infrastructure through offerings including SharePoint, Exchange, OCS, and Dynamics CRM. Our enterprise solution platform extends to the cloud through SQL Server Data Services, BizTalk Services, and many more services to come. At the lowest level within the enterprise data center, we-ve begun to deliver on our utility computing vision, with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, and through our Systems Center products including Virtual Machine Manager.

CONNECTED DEVELOPMENT - As individuals embrace a world of devices and our device mesh vision, and as businesses embrace cloud-based services and server/service symmetry, developers will need platforms and tools that span seamlessly from cloud to server on the back-end, and from PC to browser to phone (and more) on the front-end. This vision is being realized today in our .NET family of runtimes including .NET Framework and Silverlight, supported by Expression Studio for designers and Visual Studio for developers, enabling developers to leverage their skills across all these environments. Our tools will be designed to support development of solutions that seamlessly incorporate multiple tiers, with some pieces on the PC, and others on the web or mobile; with some pieces on an enterprise server, and others running cloud-based utility computing infrastructure.

Transformation of our Company

As our industry has evolved because of this web-catalyzed services transformation, so too has Microsoft.

More than two years ago when I wrote the memo entitled The Internet Services Disruption, much of the company was still focused on bringing our Office 2007 and Vista products to market. Aside from MSN, IE/IIS and our tools groups, it was truly "software", not "services", that was top of mind.

Since then, we've made tremendous progress in our expansion toward "software+services" - from the long-term quests we've undertaken and customer scenarios we now envision, to the great services and service-enhanced software we've begun to bring to market, and the amazing projects at various stages within our development pipeline.

In light of all the work that we're doing, it's important that we build a shared sense of what Microsoft's path looks like in this transition toward software+services.

For consumers, advertisers and publishers, our investments in new forms of content, community, commerce, search and advertising are key. We're investing significantly to ensure tremendous audience engagement, and to provide an attractive and well-targetable audience, ensuring that we continue to be an attractive partner for advertisers and publishers within a vibrant and competitive advertising ecosystem.

For customers and partners who use and who've invested in Microsoft's myriad offerings, we feel there's tremendous growth potential in moving toward a world that fully embraces software, services and the web. The device mesh, the social mesh, cloud- based infrastructure, and server/service symmetry represent great opportunities across all markets we serve.

Over the course of this year, and progressively over the next few years, you'll see the principles and scenarios laid out in this document come to life through many new and service-enhanced products and services for individuals, businesses and developers. As you do, I hope you'll share my excitement and optimism as you experience how we're bringing together the power of the internet, with the magic of software, across a world of devices.

Ray Ozzie

On Tuesday, Microsoft officially spilled the beans on its Live Mesh service for synchronizing data and connecting multiple devices. If your eyes are glossing over from all the mentions of seamlessness, synchronization, and software plus services, here's our best attempt at making sense of things.

What is Live Mesh?
At its most basic level it combines downloadable software and a cloud-based service to synchronize and share data and applications among different devices.

How does it work?
In large part, it uses the notion of feeds to go beyond a Web site and also to describe both data and devices.

What can it do today?
Basically two main things: It allows folders of files to be synchronized among a number of Windows PCs and to the cloud. It also enables a simple, free way to do a remote desktop with another PC in your mesh.

Live Mesh shows you your synched devices in an animated "ring." Click the image for more early screenshots.

(Credit: CNET News.com)

What's promised but not there right now?
There are a bunch of things being talked about that are not part of the current beta. Chief among that is support for other devices. Although Microsoft is billing the Mesh as a way to connect various devices, right now it only works with Windows PCs. Support for Macs and Windows Mobile devices is due soon.

Live Mesh is also billed as a way of allowing offline applications to synchronize data among multiple users and for online applications to work offline and synchronize data back up to the cloud. However, Microsoft is not providing any Mesh-ed applications as part of this release, nor is it ready with the development tools needed for outsiders to write Mesh-connected applications.

When can I get it?
Microsoft is running a closed beta for about 10,000 people right now, including attendees at the Mix '08 trade show as well as this week's Web 2.0 Expo. A broader beta is planned for around the time of this fall's Professional Developers Conference.

What is the cost?
For now, the service is free, offering 5GB of online storage, with unlimited peer-to-peer data.

So, what is the business model?
Microsoft said it is still sorting that out. Among the models under consideration are subscription-based models, advertising-based approaches, and even micropayments.

Will it work in any browser?
Sort of. Viewing one's Live Mesh can be done from Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari, but the remote desktop feature requires IE and an ActiveX plug-in.

Is this for businesses or just consumers?
The current release is really aimed at consumers, but Microsoft insists the architecture of the service is designed to meet business needs for security and other issues. Down the road, Microsoft plans to offer a way for businesses to have the "cloud" part of the data stored on the company's own servers, probably for a fee.

What services compete with Live Mesh?
For now, Live Mesh competes with a whole host of services that offer either online file storage and sharing, remote PC access, or both. That group includes folks like Box.net, LogMeIn, GoToMyPC, SugarSync, and Microsoft's own FolderShare--to name a few.

Longer term, Microsoft wants Live Mesh to be a platform that developers use to connect both online and offline programs. For that, Microsoft is competing for developers' already fragmented attention with other would-be Web platforms from Facebook, Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com, and others.

So is this what Ray Ozzie has been holed up doing the last two years?
In part. However, when pressed about whether this is Microsoft's big platform in the sky--the cloud operating system some have talked about--Microsoft indicated there is more to it and suggested the PDC might be when we see how this fits in with Ozzie's other efforts.