Oh what a mesh we are in...

It has been a few months since the Microsoft "Mesh" announcement. I am still awaiting my developer preview account - but here are some thoughts from the aftermath.

On one hand the Mesh announcement was initially disappointing. My first response was "Foldershare + some new UI stuff + maybe it actually works". Then I heard some others say "Lotus Notes Documents".

But...upon reflection I think it is one of the first steps of a fairly subtle plan - either out of intent or accident. I am thinking intent. Sun said the network was the computer, other people have coined different variants of the phrase since then. Here Microsoft Mesh is saying "the big giant distributed hard drive in the sky is the computer". This is a very savvy move given how "hard drive"-centric the Microsoft platform is. Now add on a tarted up version of the roaming profile stuff that has been in Windows since NT, and how fast broadband is now, and a Vista machine - one can start having more lightweight infra with easier synchronization of assets. If the Mesh starts moving my files close to where I am in the background - even better.

Also - look at how MSFT is describing the user experience of the Softricity stuff they bought - now called Softgrid. Although in many ways unchanged from way back when Softricity wrote it, Microsoft uses interesting words. When you "stream" an application from the server - to run on your Windows Desktop (ultimately all of the application components arrive on your machine, all executing locally) MSFT emphasizes that the application is NOT INSTALLED on the local machine. It is just "copied to the cache and executes from there". Wow! That is what I have always wanted. If a bundle of files can be copied to the hard drive and then run without spewing bits all over the hard drive, and without having anything to do with the registry, and then runs, that is what we all want. Sounds remarkably like installing software on Linux, Unix, Solaris, or Mac. The worldwide hard drive, roaming profiles, application installation via file-copying, and licensing checked at runtime, not install (copy) time - really opens up some interesting opportunities in the Microsoft world.

THEN - there appears to be WinFS bits in here somewhere - which was supposed to be a pluggable filesystem. If that is the case and I can upload a bit of CLR somehow, somewhere, that executes based on actions in the file system, then I have a big, slow, global, message bus. Which again tees up some interesting possibilities.

As we just recently saw at CloudCamp San Fran and as I said on the PaaS Panel at Structure 08; we are in the "Cambrian explosion" period of cloud computing and we will see lots of interesting life forms before the winners become obvious. Microsoft Mesh certainly adds some interesting DNA to the ecosystem.