Last night I attended the Crunchies award ceremony, where Facebook took top honors as the best overall start-up (See the full list of Crunchies award winners). The awards are based on a popularity contest via votes cast through the Crunchies Web site and with input from the Crunchies Committee, consisting of co-hosts GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and advisors.
The most surprising winner for the evening was in the Microsoft's Live Mesh, which won in the category best technology innovation/achievement. The competition included Facebook Connect (the runner-up), Google Friend Connect, Google Chrome, Swype and Yahoo BOSS.
Given that Microsoft is often vilified by the Web 2.0, start-up community, and the stellar competition in the category, it's hard to imagine that Microsoft won without a little help from the Crunchies Committee. On the other hand, the Microsoft community is large and mighty and perceptions are slowing shifting to be more positive about the openness of the giant software company. In any case, it's a deserved award, which was accepted by Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect at Microsoft, and David Treadwell, who runs the Live Services Platform.
David Treadwell and Ray Ozzie discuss the mesh with GigaOm's Om Malik.
(Credit: Andrew Mager)Live Mesh is essential glue for synchronizing files with all the devices a user might touch, and as a kind of information bus for identity, notifications, and other Web services. Microsoft, with its huge footprint, is uniquely positioned to provide a universal, operating system- and device-agnostic syncing foundation.
Ozzie and his team are working on a complete transformation of the back end and the front end, moving from PC-centric to multi-screen, he told me during a brief conversation at the Crunchies. Microsoft's Azure cloud service is another key part of the transformation, but is lagging behind Live Mesh. "2009 is still a learning year for Azure, just as 2008 was the Mesh," Ozzie said.
The challenge for Azure is moving the massive scale Microsoft platforms like XBox Live, to the Azure cloud-services architecture. "In 2009 Azure will be more mature, you'll see some large-scale usage," Ozzie said. But it won't be until 2010 that Azure is ready for prime time.
Ozzie is mindful of the profound changes culturally and technologically among its developers that Microsoft must undergo to realize the Live Platform and Azure cloud services vision. "When we are in an environment with technological and environmental change, you have to focus on these new huge constraints, but also new opportunities for destruction or rebirth," he said during a Crunchies interview with Om Malik.
For a photo replay of the Crunchies, check out Andrew Mager's post.
David Treadwell is the special guest on the Gillmor Gang this week (check out the podcast of the show here). He is the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Live Platform Services, which includes the recently introduced Live Mesh. Treadwell works directly for Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who has been working to put the Web, rather than the PC, at the center of Microsoft's computing universe.
Live Mesh is trying to solve a key user problem--how to mesh the desktop, mobile, and the Web for consumers and developers. For example, Live Mesh can provide core underlying infrastructure for synchronization, collaboration, and other services.
"This does represent a pretty significant advance for Microsoft, bringing the Web to Windows and Windows to the Web and connecting them super-well," Treadwell said.
I asked Treadwell if Live Mesh is designed as a core and pervasive layer for the Web, as Windows is for the desktop. "I don't think Live Mesh should be a required piece of technology, but we do view it as something that would enhance the user experience, with protocols that make it easy to connect with other services, such as Twitter." He went on to say that Live Mesh will enable a broad variety of usage scenarios, taking advantage of the standard Internet protocols.
David Treadwell, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Live Platform Services
(Credit: Dan Farber)During the Gang, Treadwell said he was worried during the roll out of Live Mesh that the message of an underlying platform would not resonate with users and the press. It's not easy to make plumbing exciting, but people seem to be getting the idea. "Live Mesh itself has a runtime for devices for synchronization, communications and the like," Treadwell said. It is written in Microsoft's .NET, C# and with some native code, and utilizes several public protocols. The key piece is FeedSynch, Treadwell said, surrounded by other standard protocols such as TCP/IP, HTTP, XML, RSS, ATOM, etc.
Treadwell was asked about the Live Mesh-Silverlight connection. "We make use of the Silverlight runtime for the media viewer on Live Desktop, but it doesn't require Silverlight," Treadwell said. "I view Live Mesh and Silverlight as orthogonal and complementary. Silverlight is the runtime for the presentation engine, and it has nothing for synchronization and low level communications like Live Mesh."
Regarding support for non-Windows platforms (Live Mesh currently requires Windows), Treadwell said, "Live Mesh synchronization capabilities require infrastructure running on specific devices, such as the Mac or Nokia phones. We will be pragmatic about getting to as many devices as we can. As long as people are willing to open up their devices and put code on there we will pursue it very aggressively. He also noted that a Linux Mono implementation of a Mesh client could be developed.
The Live Mesh stack
(Credit: Microsoft)Yesterday Amit Mital, Microsoft's general manager of Live Mesh, said Mac support would come in the next two months, and a prototype was demoed at the Web 2.0 Expo.
Host Steve Gillmor asked what he termed the "real" question: Is Live Mesh a transport to take Twitter messages into the Mesh and assign it to multiple affinity groups and express it on Silverlight clients that communicate with each other?
Treadwell responded, "Yes."
He was asked about synchronizing user and social-graph accounts by Marc Canter. "It's an interesting challenge around the class of data portability problems. We have to be concerned about user privacy and we are carefully exploring scenarios. The Mesh could be used but we have to make sure we are not putting user identities at risk," Treadwell said. "The Mesh doesn't have a contact store, friend relationships or other high-level features of Facebook or MySpace, but it can be used as low-level software to enable scenarios, such as synchronizing user and social graph accounts."
Dana Gardner asked Treadwell about supporting real-time applications, such as VoIP. Live Mesh uses "network transparent communications infrastructure," which connects devices regardless of network topology. "Any two devices with an Internet connection can communicate, but it doesn't have real-time communications capabilities. However, as we open up the SDK, it could be user for real-time applications.
I asked about the SharePoint-Live Mesh connection. "We are looking at ways for SharePoint to sit on top of Live Mesh. A scenario is to have Sharepoint documents synchronized across multiple devices. It's not available today but it's not hard to see some scenarios like that," Treadwell said.
He talked about a new feature coming for Live Mesh, the ability to do different version of media files on a per device basis. For example, you could have a 10MB photo on your desktop but a much smaller version on your phone, so you get the most appropriate experience on a device, Treadwell said. "We will need intelligent mechanisms to cache transcoded versions of files so we don't have to do it on the fly," he said.
Of course, there is the business model question related to Live Mesh. Treadwell said Live Mesh makes it easier for people to own and manage multiple devices, keeping the data and applications in sync. The financial benefit accrues to Microsoft in the case that people acquire more devices that include pieces of monetizable software and services from Microsoft. In other words, billions of devices have Microsoft operating systems, middleware, applications, and ad services.
See also: Live Mesh: Just one piece of the Microsoft's platform plan- prev
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