LiveSide - News blog : Horizon

Ready for Live Mesh? LiveSide to bring you “Live Mesh news”

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:56:00 GMT

Next week, at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, Microsoft is expected to unveil Live Mesh, a new product that will bring the first of Ray Ozzie’s services vision to light. Live Mesh combines a program installation on computers with a “web desktop”, or cloud based storage, and will allow computers on the “mesh” to synchronize folders among computers and to the cloud, share folders with others, and access computers on the mesh remotely from another computer or by accessing the “web desktop” via the internet.

We’ve been telling you about Live Mesh for quite some time, and as early as last December we told you to “pay attention to feedsync”. Then at Mix08 (and yeah I know the Mix badge is still on LiveSide, but have you checked out all the videos?), we deciphered Ray Ozzie’s cryptic messages for you, although the naming looks like it’s changed a bit, and Live Mesh now refers to the product that will control the “mesh” of devices to sync and share, something that was referred to as Horizon. Or something like that. Anyway, it’s Live Mesh for now.

While we’ve got a general idea of how this is all going to work – file synch via RSS shared extensions (which Microsoft is calling Feedsync, and which it placed under the open specifications promise), plus a lot more, we’re sure, we can’t wait to get a real look at what Live Mesh can do.

So we’re going to be bringing you the announcements as they hit the wire next week, and head on down to San Francisco on Thursday to get our hands on, see some demos, and talk to some of our soon to be Live Mesh friends.

We’ll have a lot more next week, but you can study up in the meantime:

LiveSide stories tagged

Microsoft churning out the Ozzie + Mesh PR, so nobody talks about Horizon

Chris — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:38:59 GMT

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.

Ray Ozzie at Mix08 - Mesh, Horizon and FeedSync

Chris — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:07:00 GMT

So today at Mix08 Ray Ozzie went back to basics. If you compare the headings of his speech to that of his famous memo, there is a lot of common ground. So if you're an exec, how do you keep yourself entertained during these keynotes when repeating the same key concepts but can't start announcing product launches? Well Ozzie seems to have come up with an idea that we approve of, namely "how many unreleased product names / codenames can I fit in".

Mesh was the most obvious one by far yesterday, with several people picking up his constant references to it, see his speech notes linked above. Steve Clayton kindly highlighted the solitary mention of Horizon too, "As this product emerges just over the horizon". Given Steve is now working in this Software as a Service area, his one-line summary is pretty succinct and worth paying attention to: "...tech preview of a cloud sync service coming over the horizon"

So for all of you untrained in reading Ozzie, or conversely if you have done so too many times and actually want to see the goods (like we said, perfectionist), here's the LiveSide summary to what Ozzie said about:

Mesh (mesh.com)

- Device management, for example the reporting of location, centralised configuration and control,
- Unified data management (see below!)
- Unified application management and deployment via the web,

Horizon (mshorizon.com)

- Unified data management
- Synchronisation of files and folders across devices
-"The bi-directional synchronization of arbitrary feeds of all kinds across your devices and the Web, a kind of universal file synch." This should ring some bells - FeedSync anybody?

We often talk about the different "waves" of MSN and Windows Live services. What Ozzie talks about isn't some evolutionary update, this almost falls into the revolutionary category (its not out yet so no definites here). This is a "Wave X" compared to the "Wave 3" we're waiting on for Windows Live. Time to sit up and pay attention.

Let us know if you spotted any other codenames buried in the keynote and we'll add them in!

Horizon & Windows Live Core - Microsoft registers domains for dogfood

Chris — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 01:04:00 GMT

Its been almost a year since we first mentioned Windows Live Core, the project lead by Ray Ozzie to establish Microsoft's software as a service platform and not much has been said since then. Microsoft hasn't acknowledged its existance, despite the various exec bios and other documents mentioning the name. This isn't suprising however when you consider that when it was started, the team was locked away in Red West C out of sight from both those inside and outside of Microsoft. Since then we've made only a handful of posts, most of them relating to the massive spending on datacenters that has been occuring over the past year and Ozzie has remained more out of sight than is usual even for him.

In our 2007 recap post we mentioned Horizon, one part of Windows Live Core relating to file sychronisation and remote access that is at the internal dogfood stage. Since the new year Microsoft has since registered mshorizon.com (and the other main TLDs) to use for its testing. Of course if you're not an employee you won't see much beyond the Live ID signin page, but hidden inside is one part of Horizon, the web desktop. How long this stage of development and testing will last is unknown, but it seems unlikely that a half-baked solution will be put out for public consumption. Ozzie isn't scheduled to speak at Mix08 either.

While we admit to being deliberately vague about Horizon (see point #7 of our manifesto), it helps that Ray Ozzie has already alluded to what Microsoft wants to deliver. Time to refer back to his Internet Services Disruption memo. We already talked briefly about opportunity #1, the seamless OS, when we talked about the recent Windows 7 news. Now its time to also include #3. Here's what Ozzie said as a reminder:

"SEAMLESS OS – The operating system as it would be designed for today’s multi-PC, multi-device, work anywhere, web-based world. Enabling you to login using any of your service-based or enterprise identities. Deploying software automatically and as appropriate to all your devices, and roaming application data and settings. Permitting seamless access to storage across all your PCs, devices, servers and the web.

...

SEAMLESS PRODUCTIVITY – Enabling you to create, find and organize documents and data among all the desktops, devices, servers and services to which you have access, and with all the others with whom you need to work, through ‘shared space’ products that are internet service-based, enterprise server-based and directly peer-to-peer. Working within and across homes, small businesses, virtual workgroups and enterprises."

One way we like to monitor the current trends inside Microsft is by the search keywords softies used to get to our site. Our top 10 searches for January, restricted to Microsoft users only, contains both 'horizon windows live core' and also '"windows live core" horizon'. Time to start paying attention.

Windows 7 details emerge - look Software + Services

Chris — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:27:00 GMT

Right now everyone is getting excited over the apparent distribution of early Windows 7 builds to external Microsoft partners. One poster over at Neowin is claiming to have installed the build and while unsurprisingly its difficult to verify this, judging from his info it could be true. He ends his post with the following (emphasis mine):

"The feedback tool lists the "pillars" of Win 7. You can see that Microsoft is aiming to fine tune this release as the case in XP rather than technological advancement as in 2K. highlights include"network aware", with improved connection tools and detections. It will have the ability to detect which network you're in and switch your settings and devices accordingly; With Live account, you can carry your IE settings and favorites with you; Gadget data caching; New Calculator, Paint, and Wordpad using WPF; install to desktop in 10 mins with only 1 reboot; instant streaming; better battery mileage, etc. All descriptions are scenario-based, so what will actually turn up is still yet to know."

Bing. And now the penny drops. Just like Ray Ozzie alluded to in his Internet Services Disruption memo, there is an opportunity through software+services for Microsoft to deliver a "Seamless OS:

The operating system as it would be designed for today’s multi-PC, multi-device, work anywhere, web-based world. Enabling you to login using any of your service-based or enterprise identities. Deploying software automatically and as appropriate to all your devices, and roaming application data and settings. Permitting seamless access to storage across all your PCs, devices, servers and the web."

So for everybody who has been emailing us and leaving comments about what is happening with Windows Live Favorites, you have one possible answer right here. Of course the service would probably need to be renamed if it carries settings too, but lets avoid the details for now and focus on the overall picture. Again a reminder than the Windows 7 information linked to above may not be 100% accurate or ever delivered in any public builds. However that said, "providing a richer browsing experience when running on Internet Explorer, including roaming of favorites and browser settings" is something that Chris Jones and his Windows Live teams are already looking at for Wave 3 and beyond. As well as accessing favourites and settings from anywhere, Ozzie also wants users to access their machines and data remotely too, something Horizon may deliver.

Its worth remembering that the aim is to make Windows Live the natural online extension to Windows, something that has already been started with Wave 2 and Windows Vista, notably around Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Photo Gallery. What remains to be seen is how Microsoft delivers this in Windows 7 and later releases without incurring the wrath of yet more EC anti-trust cases.

(Via Bink and Long)