Web 2.0: Microsoft Makes Big Bet For 'Software Plus Services' With Live Mesh

Microsoft has struggled to find its footing in the services era as former upstarts like Yahoo and Google have made themselves into household names. But it's pushing back this week by detailing a significant new mix of software, services, and a development platform it calls a "marquee" example of its evolving "software plus services" strategy: Live Mesh.

Live Mesh, formerly known under the code names Windows Live Core and Horizon, will be available in a limited technology preview to a small number of testers beginning this week. The platform aims to give people centralized configuration and remote control of their devices and data from both Web-based and client software, as well as a Web desktop that will allow users to do things like view media that they've stored on the Web. It also aims to give developers the power to write Web applications with offline and synchronization capabilities and client apps that can be extended to the Web and other devices.

"The Internet is becoming more and more central to our digital lives, whether that's our work style or our lifestyle, and we're adopting a wider and wider diversity of increasingly powerful devices," Jeff Hansen, Microsoft's general manager of services marketing, said in an interview as he detailed Microsoft's rationale for building Live Mesh. "If you take these devices and make them aware of each other in a really intelligent way over the Internet, you begin to realize that there are all sorts of interesting extensions and scenarios you can build to really tap into and work across this mesh of someone's digital life."

For example, say you want to share photos across all your devices. You might have a set of them on your desktop, but to publish them to the Web you have to use a Flickr client application, to move them to your smart phone you have to use a USB cord or Bluetooth to sync the content, and to move it to your Xbox 360 there's yet another step. With Live Mesh, Microsoft hopes to take all that complexity away and make the data spread to all your devices automatically. But that's only one piece of the larger Live Mesh puzzle that also includes sharing content with friends and co-workers and creating applications that work both online and offline.

Not all the functionality will come at once, and a wider beta of Live Mesh will be available later this year. The downloadable Live Mesh application will at first be available only for Windows Vista and Windows XP, but will soon be offered also for the Mac and then for an expanding array of smart phones, mobile devices, and other systems. The Web service for now is accessible in Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer (with mobile browsers to come), but some of the user experience elements such as the Web-based media player are built for the Silverlight browser plug-in, so those will only work if Silverlight is installed. Developers will eventually be able to use an array of languages to write apps that use Live Mesh. Live Mesh consists of two major elements: a set of user experiences, and a set of developer technologies. The Live Mesh user experience is two-fold: on the client and on the Web and is powered by a runtime called the Mesh Operating Environment (MOE). "From our perspective, the whole point of Live Mesh is so users don't have to think about what data is where," Abhay Parasnis, Microsofft product unit manager for Live Mesh, said in an interview. "They should be able to assume that data is in their mesh, and by having it in their mesh, they're available to have it wherever and on whatever device they want it to be. Whether it's physically on my work machine, or my home machine or my whole set of data is in the cloud, we don't want to make users and developers have to worry about that."

On the Web, when users sign into Mesh.com, the first thing they'll see is a "device ring" that shows all the devices that are connected to the service. Using a desktop-like interface on the Live Mesh site called Live Desktop, people can click to add folders and files that can be automatically synchronized among several devices, view multimedia files, and download the Live Mesh client to additional devices.

Another powerful feature called Live Remote allows users to connect to one of their devices and interact with the device as a remote desktop, including remote access to all the applications and data on that device, all without the need to change firewall settings or proxies. "From that point, you're effectively able to sit in front of that machine whenever it happens to be on the Internet," Parasnis said. Live Remote is made more powerful by the capability to, for example, cut and paste content from your local desktop to the to-do list on the smart phone sitting in your pocket.

On the client, Live Mesh makes a few changes to the way the operating system looks and acts with a 2 MB download. In Windows, users can right-click on a folder to add it to Live Mesh and set the folder's behavior to replicate the content to cloud storage, push it to all their devices, or share it in a controlled manner with a set of friends designated by nothing more than their e-mail addresses. The Mesh Bar attached to Live Mesh-enabled folders will track changes to that folder like new documents, changes to files, and notes about the folder's content left by others who can see the folder. A new taskbar icon gives a snapshot of all of a user's Live Mesh activity. And the Mesh Operating Environment will make JavaScript apps able to work outside of a browser.

There are plenty of other scenarios Live Mesh could provide down the road, some of which Microsoft Live Mesh general manager Amit Mital will point to in a new blog posting, such as having devices report their location, status, or health to Live Mesh. At the company's Mix conference in March, Microsoft demonstrated an early version of a service that linked together personal contacts across Hotmail, Outlook, a Windows Mobile device, and a non-Microsoft line of business application. Such a scenario could eventually be enabled by Live Mesh, but its unclear if that demo used the service.

Live Mesh even works when users aren't connected to the Internet. Any changes made to Live Mesh folders will automatically sync with the Live Mesh service as soon as the connection is restored. If the network signal is weak, Live Mesh makes sure not to choke the connection and can send data peer-to-peer between devices or through the Live Mesh service hosted in Microsoft's data centers. Microsoft will also bring developers into the fold, allowing them to Live Mesh-enable their applications, which will bring offline capabilities a la Google Gears as well as synchronization capabilities to Web apps, plus online storage and synchronization capabilities to client applications. Apps developed using Live Mesh will also be accessible on all a user's devices, according to Microsoft. "On the developer side, we believe we are going to open up whole spectrum of scenarios where developers don't have to pick between the Web or the client and they can write software plus service applications against the platform," Parasnis said.

The basis of Live Mesh for developers is a set of APIs and protocols called MeshFX, which is available for different development environments and leverages Microsoft's RSS-like open FeedSync protocol to share information among devices and over the Internet. Developers can feed the raw data they expose as feeds into Live Mesh or write a FeedSync head into their code to expose content to Live Mesh. "The programming model is the same for the cloud and all connected devices, which means a Live Mesh application works exactly the same regardless of whether it's running in the cloud, in a browser, on a desktop, or on a mobile device," Mital plans to write in his blog.

The basic API, the Mesh Operating Environment, is a RESTful API based on simple HTTP that uses the feed-based model to communicate with Live Mesh. Microsoft will also provide managed APIs for .Net, Silverlight, and JavaScript/Ajax, and Parasnis mentioned additional APIs possible for other development scenarios like Flash and Ruby on Rails. A broad beta of a developer SDK will be available later this year.

"We want to be sure Mesh is accessible to a large class of developers, no matter what development environment they are coming in on," Parasnis said. The JavaScript API, for one, will allow developers to write Ajax and JavaScript apps that not only have offline functionality, but also work outside the browser.

While the first version of Live Mesh has been built primarily for individuals and developers, Microsoft has had business use in mind from the beginning as well. As Live Mesh evolves, Microsoft will build in additional controls to allow businesses to manage access to corporate devices on Live Mesh via Active Directory, help federate identity across organizations, control usage policy, and potentially have a local implementation of Live Mesh if they would like users to access data, but don't want it to be stored on the Internet. Hansen said Microsoft will talk in more detail about business scenarios later this year.

Live Mesh is a huge new bet for Microsoft, which Gartner analyst David Smith says is one of the only companies that could pull it all off with its broad expertise and developer platform experience. However, it's unclear how Microsoft itself will adopt Live Mesh in its own applications, what start-ups and software companies will sign on, what device and service provider partners will emerge, exactly how some of the developer technologies will work, whether other identity services like OpenID will eventually work with Live Mesh, and what will happen to some of the other Microsoft products like SkyDrive and FolderShare ("it's not a replacement," Parasnis said).

At this point, since Microsoft is only releasing a technology preview, the company hasn't announced any service provider, software vendor, or manufacturer partnerships or even which of its own applications Microsoft will mesh-enable. But those might be expected as Live Mesh marches closer to release. "Over time, we expect various groups internally to utilize various aspects of this platform," Hansen said.

Over the next few months, Microsoft intends to work with early testers of Live Mesh to determine how best to monetize parts of the service and developer technologies (the first 5 GB of storage will be free), as well as what devices Microsoft should first make compatible with Live Mesh, beyond Windows and the Mac. During the late spring and summer, Microsoft will hold a series of formal "software design reviews" with the community to help shape its plans for Live Mesh.