Ozzie's 'Internet Tidal Wave' leaves a mesh
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By Larry O'Brien
May 15, 2008 —
In May 1995, Bill Gates wrote a memo called “The Internet Tidal Wave.” In the next six months, Netscape went public, Windows 95 shipped with the anemic Internet Explorer 1.0 and Microsoft developed and shipped IE 2.0. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft made its plans public, declaring, “The sleeping giant has awakened.”
It was one of the most impressive chapters in Microsoft’s history. Unlike IBM in the 1980s, the Microsoft of the 1990s was able to adapt virtually its entire product line to a disruptive technology. Redmond may have gone too far with the business practices it used against Netscape and others, and it was too slow to recognize that the “active content” capabilities of Office documents and ActiveX created unacceptable security risks. But, within a year of that memo, Microsoft went from an Internet also-ran to a Web front-runner.
Thirteen years later, Microsoft is again seen as an also-ran with the disruptive technologies of “cloud-based computing.” Everyone loves a startup—and the fad is to fawn over every company that creates a Web page or two of functionality backed by a per-user database with “add a friend” functionality. But even as far as big companies go, Amazon, Yahoo and especially Google are viewed as culturally attuned to the idea of developing not just “for,” but also “in” and “of” the Web. Microsoft, in this view, is a sclerotic dinosaur, burdened with franchises that just don’t get it—“Overwhelming market share? Ewwww.”
Live Mesh is the name of Microsoft’s cloud-based platform, and its announcement appears to be Ray Ozzie’s “Internet Tidal Wave.” Given the scope of Live Mesh, it had a curiously low-key launch, and that was seized on by naysayers as evidence that it is fragmentary and unloved.
Certainly, there’s reason for caution. In the past decade, Microsoft has perfected the art of grandiose names (at least it’s not “Windows .NET Live Mesh Foundation”) and has seemingly reached the conclusion that the denser the blocks in a diagram, the more weight the architecture can bear. The Live Mesh architecture diagram consists of 12 named bricks, four fence pickets resting in serving trays held together by a vertical tongue depressor and seven bricks that appear as unnamed drop shadows. All of that leads to the distinct possibility that Live Mesh is like an elephant being described by blind men.
But if there’s substance to those components, Live Mesh is a full-court press against other cloud platforms, such as Google App Engine. The tricky thing about “the cloud” is that you don’t need APIs with huge numbers of methods or classes to achieve significant results. The success of REST-ful APIs and mashup development approaches has demonstrated the value of using a small set of functions backed by a complex service; consider how adding mapping to a Web-based application has become a matter of just a few lines of JavaScript. For a cloud platform to succeed, it must expose in a similarly simple manner the complex services of identity, storage and synchronization. The Live Mesh architecture diagram does not reassure on those counts.
As I’ve said, some think that Microsoft muddled the Live Mesh announcement, but I take encouragement from its modesty, which seems a hallmark of Ray Ozzie. If the ship of Microsoft—significantly bigger and vastly more top-heavy than it was in 1995—is to execute a similarly dazzling course change again, Ozzie had best be at the helm. As chief software architect, Ozzie inherited the title under which Bill Gates had operated, but Ozzie’s two-year tenure has been conspicuous in its quietude. No one will ever possess Gates’ utter authority, but Ozzie has both the technical chops and business experience to best understand the Live Mesh challenge. Lotus Notes and Groove, Ozzie’s route to his position, show both the potential and drawback of synchronization based on Microsoft’s technology.
Notes and Groove were both ahead of the curve in understanding and dealing with “occasionally connected computing” and the centrality of synchronization and collaboration. Moreover, they were both notoriously resource-intensive compared with their not-quite-as-complete competitors. Live Mesh takes the concept of “occasional connection” to the next level, with the idea that you will connect to your data using a “mesh” of devices (e.g., desktop, laptop, phone, and, I suppose, your Xbox 360 and Sync-enabled car).
For Microsoft to succeed, it will need to evolve some technologies; use (without subverting) Internet standards; and, most difficult of all, exclude some entrenched Microsoft technologies, such as ActiveSync. And that’s the best reason not to buy a Windows Mobile phone or PDA.
Right now, the ease of synchronizing an iPod, an iPhone and iTunes is probably the best demonstration of what a “mesh” of devices and applications ought to be like. So, add Apple to the list of companies that Microsoft must outdo if things aren’t to get—oh, I can’t help it—terribly mesh-y.
Larry O’Brien is a technology consultant, analyst and writer. Read his blog at www.knowing.net.
Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing, Microsoft
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