Microsoft Announces Live Mesh: The Final Personal Data Unification?

Microsoft just announced Live Mesh, a platform that aims to make data available anytime, anywhere on any device. If you wonder what Live Mesh is, here’s how Microsoft thinks of it:

A platform that defines and models a user’s digital relationships between devices, data, applications, and people—made available to developers through an open data model and protocols.

A cloud service providing an implementation of the platform hosted in Microsoft data centers.

Software, a client implementation of the platform that enables local applications to run offline and interact seamlessly with the cloud.

A platform experience that exposes the key benefits of the platform for bringing together a user’s devices, files and applications, and social graph, with news feeds across all of these.

The platform is the star here. In Live Mesh, Microsoft will use the accumulated experience from computing, storage, internet application, mobile devices and user experience to build what it thinks is the ultimate platform to store, process and deliver data.

The concepts aren’t really new, but it is true that Microsoft has the know-how in each and every area required to build the desired experience. We always take these grand visions with a grain of salt, but while it might not sound revolutionary, if Microsoft can realize its vision, Microsoft Live Mesh could be to personal data what Microsoft Exchange is to enterprise email: a crushing dominance. The competition should take it seriously: the company is known to -eventually- get it right: look at the Xbox 360… [Live Mesh Blog]

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Cellphones, Computers, Top Stories