Microsoft aims to offer best of both worlds

With software-as-a-service becoming viable for an increasingly broad range of business applications, vendors such as Microsoft risk seeing the market share for traditional desktop applications decline, especially if customers perceive web services as a more cost-effective solution for their needs. How will Microsoft compete with the likes of Google or even Salesforce.com in this new era of cloud computing?

In April, Microsoft demonstrated part of its answer. A new platform called Live Mesh is intended to be the foundation for applications both from Microsoft and third parties. But it would not be the first time Microsoft has made a big noise about some new technology, only to cast it aside a year or two later. Will Live Mesh really form a core part of its strategy?

“There is more than one core,” said Gartner analyst David Mitchell Smith. “But I do think that this is one of the key things, especially since it is what their chief software architect is backing.”

That person is Ray Ozzie, a veteran of data replication from his work as one of the original developers of Lotus Notes and later of Groove. Live Mesh could be seen as Ozzie’s broadest synchronisation project yet.

However, it is not easy to tell at first glance exactly what Live Mesh is all about. Abolade Gbadegesin, one of the architects of the new technology, described it thus: “Users, instead of thinking about individual devices, and having to worry about where their information is, just think in terms of their mesh of devices, and their mesh of applications, and the mesh of relationships that they have with other users. The platform takes care of connecting them together.”

The concept is that users want to access their data and applications wherever they are.

One answer is to move all the data online, accessed by browser-based applications, which solves the problem perfectly provided you have a good connection and do not mind doing all your work in a web browser. This is broadly Google’s approach in products such as Google Docs, now being extended to custom applications via the firm’s new App Engine. In this world view, the browser is the client, the underlying operating system is unimportant, and local applications are redundant.

As you would expect from a company that makes much of its money from desktop applications, Microsoft’s Live Mesh uses a different model, in which the internet is the hub but the endpoint is also important. Users get fast processing of local data, the ability to work offline, and the richness of non-browser applications. Live Mesh does the synchronisation, so that if you switch to another device, or browse to the same data on the web, everything is just as you left it.

Microsoft is therefore betting that users are not yet ready or willing to work solely online through a browser. What is intriguing is that companies such as Google and Yahoo agree. Google is investing in its Google Gears browser extensions to enable offline working within browser applications. Yahoo has announced BrowserPlus, another browser extension offering offline storage, plus desktop integration such as drag-and-drop support.

While these moves support the notion that the client still matters, they also suggest that browser-based applications of the future will involve fewer compromises than they do today, perhaps undermining the case for Live Mesh.

But Mesh itself can be used as the infrastructure behind pure browser applications. According to Smith, the way Mesh hooks into Microsoft’s identity services is important. “The thing that doesn’t get a lot of attention yet, but soon will, is what they call the Live ID, formerly Passport. The ability to synchronise that in a federated way with Active Directory is going to be one of the most powerful capabilities of Live Mesh,” he said.

Microsoft’s Live Mesh preview, available to a limited number of testers, is the company’s first attempt at building something useful on this new platform. Its main feature is synchronised folders. Users who sign up have access to a web-based Live Desktop, with sections for devices, folders and news.

Devices are currently restricted to PCs running Windows, with Mac and mobile support promised in future. Adding a device means installing a client-side runtime component, which links it to the Live Desktop. You can then create folders, which magically appear both in the Live Desktop on the web, and on each device.

Microsoft’s preview appears efficient for file synchronisation, and useful as a means of making documents accessible via the web. However, the current implementation does not keep any version history, which means it is possible for information to be lost if more than one person updates the same file. However, Live Mesh is not intended as a backup system, but a useful demonstration of what the platform enables.

According to Live Developer Group Program Manager Ori Amiga, the way Live Mesh is implemented can be summed up in two words: synchronised feeds.

“What if we modelled everything in the world as a feed - something that every developer is familiar with,” he said. “We added a twist on it, which is that everything in the Mesh is bi-directional. We use FeedSync for that,” he added.

FeedSync, once called Simple Sharing Extensions, is a way of extending Atom or RSS feeds, commonly used for blogs, so that they support two-way data flow. Under the hood, Live Mesh therefore seems to be a set of Atom feeds.

The runtime component, called the Mesh Operating Environment, exists both on the client and in the cloud, according to Microsoft.

Third-party applications can build on this in various ways, calling Mesh services to get access to the data and relationships available to the authenticated user, or simply storing data in a Live Mesh folder.

“Silverlight fits nicely into this,” said Smith. “Silverlight is in many ways the client programming model of the future - dot-Net programming brought to the browser.”

But according to James Governor of analyst Redmonk, it is too early to tell how significant Mesh will be in the long term.

“Folder sync is a useful function, but the promise of Mesh goes much further to deliver nothing less than a synchronised web for enterprise content,” he said.

For business users of Microsoft’s platform, it thus seems like a technology worth watching.