Ray Ozzie gets criticism for speaking too generally, but we're finding out that he was speaking pretty specifically, at least in his keynote at Mix08. We kind of like this penchant Ozzie is developing for dropping code names into keynotes :)
Just imagine the possibilities enabled by centralized configuration and personalization and remote control of all your devices from just about anywhere. Just imagine the convenience of unified data management, the transparent synchronization of files, folders, documents, and media. The bi-directional synchronization of arbitrary feeds of all kinds across your devices and the Web, a kind of universal file synch.
Just imagine the possibilities of unified application management across the device mesh, centralized, Web-based deployment of device-based applications. Imagine an app platform that's cognizant of all of your devices. Now, as it so happens, we've had a team at Microsoft working on this specific scenario for some time now, starting with the PC and focused on the question of how we might make life so much easier for individuals if we just brought together all your PCs into a seamless mesh, for users, for developers, using the Web as a hub.
While it's easy to take this as more Ozzie hand-waving futuristic talk, this time he is describing a specific product, one that we've been calling Horizon, and Mesh, and is now being referred to internally as "Live Mesh". For the sake of consistency (and to acknowledge two new urls we found: www.LiveMesh.com, and www.mesh-beta.com ) we'll start calling it Live Mesh here, until we hear different. This is Microsoft, and the naming has only been referenced, and not officially announced, so of course it is subject to change.