Blogs from the team

Several members of our team have begun posting about Live Mesh on their own personal blogs -- if you're looking for more perspective on Live Mesh, or to learn more about the team, here are a few pointers, with tantalizing excerpts!

Mike Zintel (Product Unit Manager, Mesh and Storage Platform): Why Sync?

For several decades after the invention of the computer, the dominant constraint was processor cost. While mainframes had, in relative terms, impressive storage and local I/O capacity, they were primarily designed to do useful work on every clock cycle. Indeed the humans who were running around mounting and unmounting tapes according to instructions in a job control stream were trying to keep the processor from ever executing a single very expensive NOP.

It was very Tron. [...]

It’s tempting to assume that web client server wins everything. But I don’t think so.

I love the web. I’m using it now. But I still spend more time using Windows applications. At the moment I’m listening to very high quality glitch free music being streamed from my hard drive, through an iTunes client and into my headphones. I have a few folders open where I did some photo editing with Photoshop earlier today. I’m using Office to author this blog and enjoying best in class spelling and grammar checking. Messenger is open. I routinely use Premier, Lightroom, Dreamweaver, Nero, and various scanning programs.

The industry’s newest, coolest, ease of use standard setting, cleverest mobile browser ever powered device, the iPhone, has a local application for text messaging, calendar, photo album, camera, YouTube, stocks, maps, weather, clock, calculator, notes, mail, music, the phone itself and of course, the shell. The reason for this is that local applications can have experiences that are highly tuned to the device capabilities and the preferences of the customers using them.

Of course what is really happening it that the industry is moving toward the best of both worlds. Many of the local applications I describe above are invisibility connected to the web. This is nature of what we’ve been calling Software + Services.

Roman Batoukov (Software Development Engineer): What's in your mesh?

There are multiple perspectives to look at Live Mesh. [...]  First, I view the Mesh as a collaboration tool between individuals. [...]

Second, I view the Mesh as a set of Devices people own or use. [...]

Every time you add Device to a mesh, you create a new sync endpoint. You can then chose what subset of your data  you want to sync with the particular device by mapping Mesh Objects (such as Live folders) to the device.

Archishmat Gore (Software Development Engineer): Live Mesh! - the appeal to a guy like me

[...] that is what Mesh is at heart - the few guiding principles around which software and services were built. Rather than focus on "What will this service do to keep it extensible?", the Mesh team focused on "How can we represent anything and everything so that anyone can read it anywhere in the world?". The subtle difference here is the pivot point - for some, the pivot is the service, it is the hard absolute that cannot change. Everything else must be written around it to accommodate it somehow. Mesh has universally-readable data representation as it's pivot - services and software were written around it. To put it another way, the software+services implementations are a natural consequence of the design, rather than interoperability being the consequence of the implementations. Enough abstract philosophy, let's look at how these principles rendered themselves in practice

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