sktop. Apparently Microsoft is going to be opening up the Mesh environment to application developers, so it's only a matter of time until we start to see third party applications designed to run on the mesh platform.For now, this seems great. Microsoft is giving away 5 GB of online storage that can be configured to sync up with any number of computers so that you always have access to the most current copy of your files - even if you're not actually on one of your computers. It also has some very nice collaboration features that allow you to define readers and contributors to your shared folders.
However, how much should we rely on Microsoft to keep this service perpetually in operation? I have used numerous other sites that were supposed to accomplish
this very concept - although none of them did it quite as impressively as Live Mesh.Take, for instance, AOL's XDrive utility. XDrive accomplished a lot of the same functions that Live Mesh does - shared storage across multiple computers with the ability to share your files with others. They even built client side apps that would mount your XDrive cloud-based storage as a drive on your computer.
However, take a look at the email to the right, which I just received from AOL today. [note: I removed the non-pertinent paragraphs from the screenshot]
The XDrive service, which AOL billed as a place to "Back up your valuable files" and to "Conveniently access all your files from anywhere", will be dead as of 1/12/09. According to AOL, "It is never an easy decision to shut down a feature, especially one like Xdrive that some of our members have used for a long time. But we have to look carefully at all of the products supported by AOL to ensure we’re providing as much value to our customers as possible."
So in typical business speak, they're trying to make it sound like they are doing their best to provide value to their customers while reducing the value that they are providing to their customers. Amazing, huh? Apparently they never realized that giving away 5GB of free disk space to anyone that wanted it could get really, really expensive. Now that the economy is in the can, they're trying to cut costs by eliminating this free service.
So, does this bode well for the Live Mesh service? Is Microsoft more reliable than AOL to continuously support their applications?
I would think so, however, see another email that I just got recently - this time from Microsoft."As a valued MSN Groups or MSN Communities Web Folders customer, we want to notify you that the MSN Groups service will close on February 21, 2009"
Hmm....so Microsoft isn't above shutting down their online storage / collaboration environments either! MSN Groups is (was) another service that provides a lot of the same functionality of Live Mesh - online storage and collaboration. Granted, MSN Groups was painfully lacking in shared storage (3 MB or so...), so as a document repository, it was practically worthless. However, as Microsoft pushes users to rely on cloud-based storage, and soon cloud-based operating systems, we have to consider how much we can rely on these companies to maintain and preserve the cloud that they are asking us to trust with our valuable files.
