Opinion: Microsoft's Monster Mesh

And that's why this year's TechEd conference, underway right now in Sydney, opened with a keynote address from Amit Mital – Microsoft's lead dude for its Live Mesh offering.

This answer to all things cloudy aims to combine the software as a service model which is attracting legions of fans, with the power of your own PC or laptop, into what Microsoft calls "Software + Service".

It makes sense when you think about it from their perspective. If everybody moves to the cloud, who needs a copy of their software?

Microsoft is also working feverishly in the backroom to make all of its server products available via the web, to cater for those who still think the cloud is the best way to work.

So if you really must go cloudy, that's fine, as long as you use Microsoft's backend rather than that other service from that search engine mob. Live Mesh is basically a steroid-enhanced version of Apple's MobileMe offering.

Rather than just synchronising your email, calendar, contacts and boomarks, Live Mesh wants to sync all your data and they're giving everyone 7GB of space for the purpose – surprisingly or not, the same space Google gives its users – and all for free, at least for now.

Amit Mital justified this push by observing that what stops cloud computing in its tracks is bandwidth, or rather the lack of bandwidth.

Non-capital city residents of Australia would no doubt agree – if you can't get a fast affordable Internet connection then putting all your eggs in the basket in the sky is dangerous.

And Microsoft would love to sell you a small business server for all your branch offices, so you can work at full speed, while syncing with head office via the Internet.

Of course this is also good for their bottom line and it won't hurt regional resellers either. And you can do it right now, without waiting for the national broadband network to snake its way to your office door.

In the far distant future it seems obvious that even large corporations won't bother maintaining the in-house complexity required to service their IT needs.

But today they still prefer to do it that way, and the rest of us are forced to do it that way too, like it or not, unless we have lightning fast Internet access.

Microsoft's Live Mesh is shaping up as the hybrid we had to have, combining local grunt with access to the cloud in the background.

But just like hybrid cars, which will stop one day when the oil runs outs, software + service seems likely to evolve into services with no local software as network bandwidth ramps up globally.

And once again it looks as though Microsoft will be ready to take advantage of whatever IT methodology evolves.

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