In case you haven't been following the Microsoft PR Mix08 tour bus, here's the numerous stops they've been making on the subject of Ray Ozzie and Mesh:
- The FT churns out a great piece, which you could be forgiven for thinking that Ray Ozzie wrote himself judging by the style and vagueness. Of course he didn't because they actually showed something palpable towards the end, www.mesh.com - "a location where consumers will be able to go to register their devices for the new services and set the levels of information they want to access from different places."
- Om Malik turns out a pretty good interview with Ray, though of course the new benchmark is Sarah Lacy so that doesn't necessarily say much. Ray also talks about the enterprise scenario and how Amazon has situated themselves.
- Dan Farber talks about FeedSync and how Microsoft is building "a seamless mesh that can synchronize content, services and applications across a variety of devices and user scenarios via the Web as a hub."
Microsoft PR Dan also mentions what we've been shouting about for a while, that FeedSync is behind all this sharing; "users want to be able to access their data from any device, and for the data to be up-to-date, secure and without duplicate content."
Notice how none of these stories actually talk about what people will do once they have this mesh - remote access? storage? file synchronisation? Mary-Jo Foley filled in some gaps today, talking about Horizon being (amongst other things) a combination of FolderShare and SkyDrive. There's still a lot more to Horizon though, hence the almost deafening amount of noise being drummed up about mesh.
And to think not one of those people talking about mesh actually bothered to question why the url went to preview.mshorizon.com. I guess we'll just have to shout a little louder next time.