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Mitchell Ashley

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Live Mesh - The Race To Become Web 2.0's Next Edison

By Mitchell Ashley on Tue, 04/29/08 - 6:10am.

So who is the Edison of today? Or should I say, who will be the Edison this next era of the utility network? All the big guys are going after it; Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Yahoo, OpSource and just about anyone else attempting to create an "ecosystem" of partners running on their software, computing, storage or marketplace platform.

I'm in the process of reading Nicholas Carr's book The Big Switch: Rewiring The World, From Edison To Google. An exceptional read, btw, a book I very highly recommend. My buddy and blogger friend Sam Van Ryder pushed me to read the book. Carr's the guy who wrote the controversial book Does IT Matter?. The Big Switch is all about the move to utility and cloud computing, SaaS, on demand software and why corporate data centers will be displaced by utility IT software and services. I can't help but think about how Live Mesh and Microsoft's other software services initiatives are really a fight for survival in a post-Gates Google era of software and computing.

Carr talks about how power generation was something that individual businesses and manufactures did for themselves a little over a century ago. But as power generation began centralize and became much more cost effective, it no long made economic sense for businesses to own power generation capabilities. Instead, they bought it off the grid. But one of the initial battles was over transmission standards, AC vs DC. Here's where Edison won out, and became "the guy" who effective built out the grid that became the electric "network" we use today.

So who is or will be the Edison of today? Or will we have to go through a plethora of vendor centric platforms, whether it be Google's narrow software platform, LAMP, Microsoft .NET, etc., before a true interconnected grid emerges. Other than announcing hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint, Microsoft's not disclosed much about Microsoft in the utility computing or utility software world. Sure we have Windows Live but much of Live is about cloning Google's search and ad generation revenue capabilities for Microsoft, truly a catch up strategy against Google, and creating basic Live apps that are net-connected for publishing data. This catch up game is the huge reason Microsoft really needs the Yahoo hostile takeover acquisition to happen.

But Microsoft's been more forthcoming and shown some thought leadership in other areas, specifically Live Mesh. One of the things I find very compelling about Ozzie's mesh strategy is the element of synchronization. No one else is really talking data synchronization across all the devices you use, and I think this capability is crucial in a connected world of information and software. Cloud-based utility computing and storage are one thing, but having a strategy for getting data on and to the right device could be something Microsoft jumps ahead of the industry on. That's not the kind of innovation we are used to from Microsoft, but maybe things are different in the Ozzie era of Microsoft.

How's that old Chinese proverb go? May you live in interesting times. I find these time very interesting,

Like this? Here are some of Mitchell's recent posts.

First Impressions - Live Mesh Review

Microsoft's Under Promise / Over Deliver Strategy
Told Ya So - Virtualization On The Desktop
1 for 1 with Vista SP1
Shutting Down The "Bill" Syndrome

Mitchell's Hottest Blog Posts:
Google Scoops Microsoft-Delivers Mesh First
Hyper-V Leaves Linux Out In The Cold,
Apple Fixes Open Source Vulnerabilities,
What Microsoft Mesh Means To You,
Apple iPhone Doomed To Failure.

Check out Mitchell's Converging On Microsoft Podcast. Current Podcast Episode: Security Mike Gets Serious About Security

Also visit Mitchell's personal blog The Converging Network and SSAATY Security Podcast.

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