“For years, Microsoft, under Ray Ozzie, has been on about the opportunity of merging software with the cloud,” Ina Fried writes for AllThingsD. “In particular, Ozzie’s team laid the ground work for Live Mesh, a software service designed to keep documents in sync, in the cloud and on devices.’
“But after a quick start out of the gate when it was launched back in 2008, Mesh has been running in place at best for the past several years,” Fried writes. “It has gone through name changes, feature changes and switched places in the Microsoft organization. Yet, it remains limited by its caveats and complexity.”
“While Google touted its cloud-only approach with Docs and Microsoft allowed Mesh to stagnate, Apple flew largely under the radar. It took baby steps of its own, mainly with a little-known product called iDisk that allowed documents to be saved to the cloud. Like Mesh, it was limited and cumbersome, “Fried writes. “But Apple has clearly learned from its mistakes.”
Fried wonders, “Has Microsoft?”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: They probably have, likely several hundred times over, but each one got lost in the hopeless vacuum of corporate politics and stifling, paralyzing bureaucracy.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
And that’s why are all on MDN rather than M$DN.
microsoft is reflective of the culture they serve.
Business is about management and layers of authority and shifting priorities as much as it is about money.
They “re-org” in Redmond so often it’s truly absurd.
Speaking of MS and other bad actors, guess who just attended this year’s Bilderberg meeting at St. Moritz, Switzerland?
Bill Gates, Craig Mundie (MS), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Eric Schidt [sic], Chris Hughes (co-founder, Facebook), Reid Hoffman (co-founder, LinkedIn). Hmm. Wonder what they were up to?
Probably trying to get a worldwide advantage because they don’t have the brains to do it in traditional ways such as I-N-N-O-V-A-T-E
They were probably trying to have a clandestine meeting with agents from SMERSH, SPECTRE and KAOS … until Hughes blurted it out on his Assbook page.
So, tell me what they were doing mixing with various European royals, heads of financial institutions (incl. David Rockefeller), Robert Gates, Keith Alexander (Commander, USCYBERCOM; Director, National Security Agency), Henry Kissinger, Charlie Rose, etc.?
iCloud is still merely a concept up to today. Too soon to compare it to anything else.
It’s fair to say that iCloud is yet unreleased and unproven in mass use, but it is clearly beyond the “Concept” stage.
I agree. A rose by any other name…
Yeah,, right…under the radar. Building a million square feet data center unted the radar.
It is under the radar. If it was 100 stories high, then it would be on the radar. (Oh, you meant the metaphorical radar…)
Microsoft’s current product release model:
1. Announce vaporware designed to compete with existing product 2 years early in a laughable attempt to stall adoption.
2. If 1. fails either, a. cancel product and claim it was “a concept” (Courier), b. release a lackluster shell of the product and kill it 2 months later (Kin) or c. release a lackluster shell of the product and spend billions in strategic partnerships in an attempt to bail it out (Win 7 Phone). Fire VP(s) of unit responsible for development to show you take accountability seriously.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
😀
You covered this very well, but you left out an important step in the MS method: launch ill conceived and poorly targeted ad campaign that is either disturbing (Kin) or pointless (Jerry Seinfeld).
Skydrive or whatever they are calling this year is slick but only if you are on windows and use webdav. Only piece of their cloud ive used.
Live Mesh? Debuted in 2008? Are they serious? I’ve never even heard of this. If someone who keeps up with the tech news like myself has never even heard of it, how in the world do they expect others to know about it?
Yeah its been that long.
I haven’t payed attention to it in awhile, but it was decently slick the last time I played with it (a year ago I think).
You could even access your desktops remotely using it.
I think they released a mac client, but I never bothered to test it on my Mini.
I wonder how many people actually use this. They’ve really got to advertise this to the end user more.
Wait, on second thought, just keep doing what you’re doing, M$. Keep up the good work!
Never understood the problems with iDisk. Tried to backup a folder with lots of small files (about 8,000 files, average size: 16K). Total size was only about 500MB. It took half a day to upload! Tried it the next day as a single ZIP file of about 250MB, and it took about two minutes.
What’s up with that?
The problem with iDisk was it was WebDAV, which on a slow connection would tie up the Finder and you couldn’t use your Mac anymore. I stopped using it years ago.
I use heavily Dropbox and it works almost flawless.
I hope the icloud thingy works like that.
Microsoft learned by waiting for Apple to figure it out. Then MS will copy it and brag about being first, even though being first doesn’t mean squat when its as POS.