Monday Note

Last week’s column asked how you’d like to be Microsoft’s CEO, caught between the aging desktop and the emerging cloud. How do you grab a significant (Microsoft likes “dominant”) share of Cloud Computing. without cannibalizing your desktop business? Imagine shutting off the Divine Earnings Stream, the immense profits from desktop applications, Microsot Office, mostly before the Cloud applications profits kick in. Immense? In one quarter, Microsoft Office makes as much money as Google does in one year.

This week, we have the answer: Live Mesh.

We The People, are going to get the best of both worlds, the Desktop and the Cloud, without any disruption whatsoever. It is so beautiful, so obvious that I wonder: How come I didn’t think of it before? Actually, I did. I once was a corpocrat, we told stories like this all the time. Chief, no problem, here is how we get the best of both worlds. Same thing in politics, a French president campaigned on Change With Continuity. In the US, we have More Spending With Less Taxes.

The Theory Of Everything: Live Mesh synchronizes everything on all your devices — through the Cloud. An offer we can’t refuse. See, you keep using your PC, meaning Office the way you always did. But we, Microsoft, know you’ve been seduced by these sirens: smartphones, laptops, Macintosh and, soon, MID, Mobile Internet Devices (small pocketable computers not running Windows and using Cloud applications through non-Microsoft browsers). No need to feel guilty, my son, come back to our embrace — and don’t forget your wallet. Live Mesh connects all these devices and applications in a synchronized mesh. Here, synchronized means your data are kept identical, up-to-date, everywhere. Let’s say you have a PC at the office, a laptop and a smartphone. The PowerPoint presentation you write at the office will automagically propagate to your other devices. So, when you’re on the Eurostar going to London, you edit the same presentation on your laptop and the changes appear everywhere on your universe of devices and applications. And, while you’re at it, make sure to create different Meshes: one for your work and one for your family. This way, the pictures from your smartphones will propagate to your wife’s iMac, just like that. [Sorry, I've just been advised by Microsoft there is an update for Silverlight to be downloaded: Click Here. And, sorry again, "We Were Unable To Service That Request".... Just happened as I'm writing this on Google Docs.]
The problem with this story? Too perfect. Who can disagree with keeping everything synchronized, consistent? In Valley argot: When it’s all pros and no cons, it’s a con! We’re being framed, the proposition is couched in an artfully arranged perspective leaving annoying details in the dark and no room for disagreement. Still in Valley-speak, we also call such discourse markitecture, architectural discussions for marketing purposes only. No need to worry about the Mere Matter Of Implementation. Which is where the ugly details lurk.

Examples: Do I want to replicate everything everywhere? Do all my company documents belong into my smartphone, or even my personal laptop? Does my home iTunes music and video library belong to my PC at the office? Away from industry conference slideware, pedestrian reality intrudes: the dream of seamless (another much abused word) synchronization becomes a complicated reality of segregation and permissions. Where can this file go and not go, who owns it, who can see it, modify it. Nothing new here, these are old, known computer systems problems without simplistic solutions. Things get even more complicated when what you really want isn’t synched copies of presentations but calendars, address books and more delicate data structures, think real-time business data for a mobile organization, running on incompatible systems. Ask the folks at RIM/Blackberry, it’s close to black magic — and a reason why Microsoft should buy a winner like RIM instead of a Yahoo!

And there is another “mere matter”, the matter of making money, the business model. At an industry conference this week, one of the Mesh evangelist, Amit Mital, was asked by a French journalist, Dominique Nora: What about the business model? In substance, the answer is it’s still very early to talk about money. Here, “it” refers to the availability of Live Mesh. In other words, we’re being conceptual here, folks, this is not a product announcement. Just an attempt to cloud the Cloud. Don’t worry about this Google stuff, keep using our desktop applications, we’ll protect and extend your investment as you use more and more connected devices.
Pure, undliluted markitecture, a clever attempt by Microsoft to finesse the Cloud vs. Desktop dilemma.

Next week, if nothing more pressing presents itself, we’ll examine some of the half-truths in Goggle’s theory of Cloud Computing. And, perhaps, my boss Mr. Filloux will let me take you through an exercise in kremlinology: commenting Ray Ozzie’s BS paragraph by paragraph. For fun, I used to do this for an industry analyst in Paris and it got me my second biggest career break. Who knows what this could lead to now. –JLG

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