Live Mesh and Windows 7 Revealed

The steady drumbeat about Live Mesh (what I called Microsoft Mesh until Microsoft named its mesh strategy) and Windows 7 are rapidly becoming the topics to speculate about in the online media. I've seen a big up tick in blog posts and articles about Live Mesh in the last week after it was revealed that Microsoft would unveil the next layer of the Live Mesh onion at next week's Web 2.0 Expo. There's more and more speculation about what Live Mesh will be, and some are good guesses and much of it is just a rehashing of what we already know.

I've been putting the pieces together for some time now, even prior to Ray Ozzie's talk about mesh at Mix08 earlier this year. I expect next week's unveiling of Live Mesh at Web 2.0 Expo to start to sew together the pieces of Live Workspace, with some level of data synchronization, driven by FeedSync or Microsoft Sync Framework , back to the desktop environment. I don't think we'll see any web delivered Office applications (not just hosted but delivered web 2.0 style) next week but I'd love to be pleasantly surprised. More likely we'll see some connectivity, sync and management tools for Live Mesh. We'll just have to wait and see.

Windows 7, the other hot topic, is getting billed as the path for Microsoft to save itself from the embarrassment of Vista. I think everyone's got it all wrong about Windows 7. It's not the effort to "fix" Vista and save face for Microsoft. Very little is around to say exactly what the 2010 shipping Windows 7 will be but my bet is that Windows 7 will have two main goals.

First, Windows 7 will bring some form of application virtualization and web delivered applications through IE 8 to the desktop. Microsoft has got to do this to start to move its Office software into the cloud and rewriting Office as web apps won't be an easy task. Silverlight, Hyper-V and IE 8 have to mature further. 2010 provides some time for that to happen. I think Windows 7 will be the update to Vista that puts these technologies to work for Microsoft's own applications. Windows 7 won't be a Vista replacement, but an upgrade to Vista. Sorry Vista bashers, you're going to be using Vista even with Windows 7. Second, Windows 7 will drive elements of Live Mesh back into components that ship with Microsoft's operating system, just like Microsoft's done with so many other technologies.

While it's fashionable to bash Vista, I can say from my own personal experiences that Vista's been a surprising great experience. I've used it continuously on my main computer since Vista was released. After turning off UAC and relearning where things were again, I've found it to be remarkably stable. So while everyone keeps on the path of Windows 7 being a face saving effort, I believe Windows 7 is vital to Microsoft enabling the next generation of software applications, including its own Office suite for the web. Time will tell if I'm right or not.

Oh, and one other thing. Anyone notice a coincidence in the closeness of the Gartner 2011 death of Winodws prediction and Windows shipping in 2010? Good move by Gartner to get lots of attention from all of us leading up through 2011.

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