Will MobileMe Mesh?

I've been asking myself this "Will MobileMe Mesh?" question since Apple unveiled its new push-sync server cloud service early yesterday afternoon. I'm a scratched CD about this, but one more time: Sync is the killer application for the Web 2.0 era. As people generate more content in more places and access said data from more devices, universal sync is an increasing necessity.

Simply put: Your content available everywhere you need it and up to date in all places you get it. Microsoft has a great strategy going with Live Mesh, which relies on an extensible, feed architecture. Problem: Live Mesh is limited beta. Apple is preparing for a July product/services launch.

Maintaining Relevancy
Quick recap: Apple will replace its existing .Mac service with MobileMe, off domain .me.com (instead of .mac.com). MobileMe promises push data sync through the server cloud among iPhone, iPod Touch, Mac and Windows PC. Yesterday, Phil Schiller, Apple's marketing chief, called MobileMe "Exchange for the rest of us." (Microsoft should take this nod to Exchange Server as a compliment.) The service will fulfill, in just about a month, many of the synchronization promises Microsoft made for Live Mesh.

Microsoft has vision, but Apple has got execution—and MobileMe comes from a company that had been a Web 2.0 laggard. No more. Apple designed MobileMe to be extremely desktop-like and to mimic on the Web what customers get from their Mac software.

Apple also is doing something remarkable that Microsoft should imitate. Through sync, Apple maintains the relevancy of its desktop software, by treating its legacy as just another client. Web-based apps can replace their legacy desktop counterparts by offering "good enough" end user experience while providing data access anytime, anywhere and on anything. But most Web 2.0 applications/services still require the end user to go somewhere to get their stuff. MobileMe pushes out the data from the client to other devices supported by the Web service. Important content comes to you everywhere from anywhere you create it. All clients become important because of the synchronization glue binding them together.

Live Mesh uses similar concepts but is still too underdeveloped for comparison. Mesh promises more, though. Apple will give great sync (presumably), but within a limited sphere of software or device clients. Live Mesh is supposed to broadly support many cell phones, other devices, several operating systems and other Web 2.0 platform services. MobileMe is, for now, tied to iPhone, iPod Touch, Mac OS X and, on Windows, Outlook 2003 or 2007. Live Mesh may rock when it scales. But when is still far away.

Microsoft has opportunity through Live Mesh to push ahead of one major Apple limitation: Synchronization engines. Apple is going down two divergent and only modestly complimentary synchronization paths: MobileMe and iTunes. I understand how iTunes came to be Apple's major sync hub, but it's just not right for increasing number of content types businesses or consumers would want to sync. Microsoft should offer a single sync engine that scales.

Better Sync, Easily Explained
What should bug Microsoft and its partners: Apple is pushing ahead with many services categories already offered by Microsoft. But Apple has tighter integration across products and services and much better marketing presentation. For example, Windows Live Contacts is supposed to be a single contact repository for multiple Microsoft (and third-party) products and services. But the processes for getting contacts out of, say, Outlook, are kind of kludgy. The problem: Microsoft allows too many different data repositories—Outlook, Windows Live Mail and Windows Mobile, among others—without enough integration or simple synchronization.

By comparison, Apple more evenly silos contact stores and offers push synchronization among them. Contacts added to Outlook, automatically sync to MobileMe and to iPhone, and visa versa. By comparison, Windows Live for Windows Mobile is a great utility, but it doesn't offer anywhere the cross-services integration Apple promises with MobileMe.

Apple also has prepared useful online tutorials explaining how MobileMe sync works on the Macs, Windows PC iPhone and iPod Touch. By comparison, Microsoft offers no quick-and-easy place to learn how to use, say, Windows Live Contacts and import (forget sync) data from other data stores. Bottom line, then: Apple's integration, synchronization and presentation exceed what Microsoft offers, even though the company has a more advanced and more extensibly set of products and services. Caveat: MobileMe isn't yet available; I'm assuming the service acts the way it was demonstrated.

The caveat is worth exploring further. It's one thing for Apple sync to work well in a single demo. It's something else to see performance scale for hundreds of thousands or millions of users. Microsoft is deploying massive data centers for Live Mesh and other Live services. But Apple may not have scale problems, because its user base will be much smaller. Microsoft's scale problem measures in the hundreds of millions of Live IDs, for services largely offered at no cost. Apple will charge $99 to $149 a year for MobileMe; the fees will turn away most potential customers, allowing Apple to scale as more customers pay.

Like the transition from domain @hotmail.com to @live.com, I expect MobileMe to set off another land rush, from @mac.com to @me.com. I presume that Apple employees will either get the really good @me.com IDs or they will be blocked, like: whatabout@me.com, iam@me.com, donttreadon@me.com, dontbug@me.com, or derivatives of words ending in ame spelled out @me (e.g., s@me.com). Apple should learn from Microsoft. People are very sensitive about their e-mail addresses. I've had my .Mac e-mail address for more than eight years. Many people have .Mac addresses for their iTunes accounts.

I personally don't think much of @me.com as part of an e-mail address. There's something me-too about @me.com compared to Microsoft's @live.com.