Why Live Mesh Can Save Microsoft

In my overnight post about Live Mesh, I called it both "the most anti-Web 2.0 technology" and "bold, brilliant and downright scary." While both descriptions apply, this post will focus more on the bold and brilliant and what that means for Microsoft's future.

Live Mesh is the first "preview" deliverable from Microsoft's new services platform. Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, is overseeing the platform development. His accomplishment so far, even though it's taking too long to fully realize (measured in Internet time), is breathtaking in scope and vision.

Ozzie stands at the pinnacle of Microsoft's radical transformation and equally at the precipice of disastrous failure. The pinnacle and precipice are more about Microsoft the company it is today than any competitor in the marketplace.

Office and Windows define Microsoft, whether measured by corporate culture or profits. But the products are rapidly becoming anachronisms before the World Wide Web and the numerous devices that connect over telephony or IP networks. Anachronisms Office and Windows may be becoming, but they remain the engines powering Microsoft revenue and its supporting ecosystem of partners and products. No Microsoft executive would risk disrupting the Office and Windows juggernauts. The potential loss in corporate identity and revenue would be too great.

So, with support from Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and presumably CEO Steve Ballmer, Ozzie is building something new and at great expense. About two years ago, Wall Street analysts panicked over a mysterious $2 billion siphoning off of Microsoft revenues. It was Ozzie's seed money, for building a massive data center infrastructure and for developing a new services platform. Better stated: a new services operating system—Windows in the cloud, so to speak.

In building out the new architecture, Ozzie identified the right problem and the means by which Microsoft can maintain its relevance, even as more consumers, developers and enterprises look to the Web rather than just the PC: synchronization. Strangely, it's the same problem solved by Windows in the 1990s on the PC.

It's an Old Problem
Old fogies like me remember the 1980s and 1990s bad days of file incompatibility. File format incompatibilities impeded computing and commerce. The file created in Lotus 123 or WordStar couldn't be easily opened, if at all, in Excel or WordPerfect. Data couldn't easily be synchronized across software applications or among disparate file formats. Standardization was Microsoft's great computing accomplishment during the 1990s. Through standardization, albeit around proprietary file formats, Microsoft opened the way for better computing and commerce.

The Web has resurfaced this past problem and magnified its negative impact, particularly as the Web 2.0 platform has evolved since the dot-com bust. Conceptually, the Web should facilitate free-flowing information based on standards. After all, Tim Berners-Lee purposefully built the hypertext and communications model around accepted or open standards.

But the Web 2.0 platform is about business and vendors with conflicting interests. Facebook is great example of the problem's breadth. Facebook is a decisively closed community and platform. Information easily goes in but doesn't easily come out. Facebook is reminiscent of early PC operating systems.

In addition, the modern Web lives up to its name, by connecting many disparate things—content, devices and people—together. However, there is no common language for these things to communicate.

The problem Microsoft helped solve for the PC platform in the 1990s isn't all that different from the one presented today by the Internet platform. Synchronization is a viable solution—I would argue the best one. It's a tough task and one Ozzie has taken on, and despite forces within Microsoft that would want to preserve the Office and Windows anachronisms for all the billions of additional revenue they will generate.

The Cloud Operating System
So, Ozzie and his team partly started from scratch, by building a new operating system architecture but for the Internet platform rather than the PC platform. Many of the developer technologies or tools are Microsoft's. But Windows isn't the broader code base for the architecture (although there are hints of the original Longhorn architectural vision, circa 2003). If the services platform goes the direction I believe, it may one day subsume Windows and Office. But that's a topic for another post.

Live Mesh, as first services deliverable, even as a preview, promises big changes: easy social networking and mobile computing without buying into closed platforms like Facebook. Live Mesh is considerably more open and yet, from another perspective, considerably more closed.

The open should be obvious: If Microsoft can really deliver on synchronization, people can more freely communicate and share content across disparate applications, devices and services; it's a truly ambitious undertaking. The closed: Live Mesh and Microsoft's broader services operating system would be required for all this social and content magic to take place. This is the anti-Web 2.0 aspect I harped about earlier today.

Synchronization is the killer application for the modern Web, and Ozzie seems to understand this really well. But the approach he is taking doesn't venture far from Microsoft's standards-controlling practices of the 1980s and 1990s. In the May 1995 Internet Tidal Wave memo, Gates emphasized the importance of controlling file formats on the Web. If Live Mesh succeeds—meaning Microsoft delivers on seamless synchronization and consumers, developers and enterprises embrace it—the company will control something much better than any file formats. Microsoft will establish through its synchronization and services platform a broad and necessary role for its technologies in the post-Web 2.0 era.

Live Mesh and the services operating system together are the solution to Microsoft's Google problem, assuming they fulfill their promise. Microsoft won't dispatch Google by buying Yahoo or gaining advertising or services market share. Microsoft needs a competing platform built on the Internet platform that pulls in developers and offers the company control over an indispensable technology—synchronization. No one will recognize Microsoft in five years, if Ozzie can deliver within the next 18 months. Can he do it?

Related Posts:

• Live Mesh: Windows Becomes the Web, Microsoft Watch, April 23, 2008
• Ozzie's Mesh Mashup, Microsoft Watch, April 17, 2008
• Do IT Simply with Sync, Microsoft Watch, March 11, 2008
• Ray Ozzie Says Nothing New, Again, Microsoft Watch, March 5, 2008