MobileMe vs. Live Mesh

A friend of mine recently asked me for my thoughts on Apple’s MobileMe. Apparently, he wasn’t aware of my big conflict of interest. However, after some time, I thought, why not? At the very least I can share my thoughts about why I won’t be using it, and why you probably will.

Mobile Me

For those of you who haven’t heard, MobileMe is Apple’s new sync/cloud storage platform. Whether you’re on your Mac, PC, iPhone, or iPod Touch, you can access your email, contacts, calendars (and via “push,” too). An online photo gallery and an “iDisk” are also available as online storage spaces for your files. Taken at face value, MobileMe sounds great, doesn’t it? And for many people, it will be. Like all Apple products, MobileMe’s UI is beautiful and easy to use, but MobileMe shares another trait with Apple products, too: it’s a tightly closed platform.

MobileMe will quickly lock you into Apple’s walled garden – and you’ll pay to get in there, too. For $99 you get 20 GB of storage or you can get the family pack for $149…per year. For every 20 extra GBs you need, you’ll also need another $50. And if you already use another email address, like your own domain or email from another free webmail provider like Gmail or Yahoo, you’ll have to give that up, too, or at least learn how to forward, because MobileMe requires an @me.com address.

Of course, if you’re already an Apple user with a Macbook, iPhone, iPod Touch, and whatever else Apple invents for you to buy, you’ve probably already signed up to be notified about MobileMe and are eagerly awaiting the day you can begin using it.

Live Mesh

Microsoft, on the other hand, like the nerdy, older guy in the Mac vs. PC commercials, has been busy coding a developer’s platform called Live Mesh that’s cool, but sort of secretive, too. I mean, with blog posts like this, it’s clear that they’re not even talking to the consumer anymore, so only true computer geeks are still listening. And that’s really too bad because, like all the complex tools that have come out of Microsoft throughout the years, Mesh could also be the next great thing if they could just hire a UI guy to slap some adorable little icons all over it.

OK, I jest. Don’t get me wrong – UI is very important stuff. Arguably, one of the most important things to the consumer these days. Yet it seems we’ve decidedly moved away from a time when caring about what was under the hood was important. Who builds their own PCs anymore? Who replaces their menus and file explorers with crazy, downloadable replacement programs? Who configures the heck out of their tools, applications, and settings so they have a truly personalized computing environment? I guess just me. I’m the one. Everyone else seems perfectly fine to deal with the lovely, yet homogenized world that Apple has created for them. And when something doesn’t work right – like, say, Flash on the iPhone, then it’s just somebody else’s fault.

Meanwhile, Live Mesh is being quietly ignored as the blogosphere drools over iPhone 2.0 (Yes, I’m getting one. That’s not the point). The point is, the blogosphere has given up on Microsoft. The Apple fans (check the comments) are downright terrifyingly vicious in their devotion. Hey, I love my Apple stuff, and if I was rich like you, I’d probably supplement my computing world with a bit more of it; but for now, I still believe there’s more to tech than just what comes out of Apple.

Anyway, back to Mesh. Since no one is bothering to explain it that well, here’s my go at it. It’s a platform not a service. It’s not a web app. It’s not a website where you go and upload files so you can say you offer “cloud computing.”

Or, even better, to quote Steve, “MobileMe could be "built" on Mesh. Unlikely of course, but the opposite isn’t true.” Or yes, even a service like Twitter could run on Mesh.

But for now, Mesh is about sync and access anywhere. I right-click a folder and choose “Add to Mesh.” Now it’s anywhere I have access to computer. A PC, but Mac and Mobile are still coming soon.

And it’s not some crazy proprietary .NET rehash, either. Says John Carroll, “they aren’t proposing protocols for data exchange that would be alien to most web developers. HTTP, RSS, REST, ATOM and JSON are are standard protocols, and though FeedSync may be new-ish, it is an XML protocol based on ATOM and RSS…This is a real shift, in other words, for Microsoft. They are starting to realize that it is better to be the generalized platform used even on non-Microsoft platforms ”

So when Mesh doesn’t work on the iPhone, guess what? It’s not going to be because it wasn’t using the proper protocols. It will be because Steve Jobs didn’t want it to.

Anyway, if what I know about Mesh really happens one day, it will be totally cool. Revolutionary. But then we’re back to the secret thing again. Sigh.

So I await the tongue-lashing from my friends who will once again depress me by explaining in detail all the reasons why Mesh is going to fail.

They have no idea, but really Microsoft is either going to live up to this:

….or it will fail big-time, but for this round, there’s no gray area.

So, excuse me for hoping that they still have them in them to do the former.