The Wall Street Journal | From .Net to Live Mesh - Microsoft and The SaaS Cloud
Cloud-gazing is no longer the pastime of the poetic or the idle. Big tech companies are thinking about clouds, too.
The notion of doing computing "in the cloud" has been kicking around ever since the Internet grew up. Like many technology buzz words, this one can be as elementary or as complicated as a marketing department wants to make it.
That so many tech heads are in the clouds was evidenced by Microsoft's announcement last week of a project that had been in the works for several years. Microsoft, like many other companies, sees clouds as a salvation from the problems happening down here on terra firma. There's a chance, though, that as Joni Mitchell sang, they really don't know clouds at all. Most simply, "in the cloud" describes something that happens on the Web. If you regularly copy your most important files to an online storage provider, you are backing up your files "in the cloud." A standard schematic diagram of a technology setup shows two computers in a room connected to each other, drawn as two boxes with a line between them. When the Internet arrived, those lines started to blur. If you were showing the connection between an East and West Coast sales office, for example, you'd have two boxes, but with a big puffy cloud between them. Saying the offices were linked "in the cloud" was a shorthand for saying the connection somehow happened "out there," but that you didn't really know or particularly care about the specifics, because those specifics didn't really matter. The job was getting done. As more things started happening in the cloud, tech companies, naturally, began trying to elbow their way into the cloud business. A lot of this was for big companies. Individual users had Google with its online application programs, Apple and its online file-sharing service for Mac users, and social networks like MySpace and Facebook that have been opening their networks to outside developers.
All of these developments represent a challenge for Microsoft, which got to where it is by providing desktop software like Windows and Office. The company's most recent response to that challenge came last week, in the form of Live Mesh, a huge engineering effort several years in the making from a squadron of Redmond, Wash., programmers headed up by Ray Ozzie. He's the former Lotus developer, who is now Microsoft's chief software architect charged with forging cloudy new directions.
For individual computer users, Microsoft says that Live Mesh, when it opens to the public later in the year, will be a way to access files from multiple computers, to share them with colleagues and to exchange messages about them. Later on, says the company, Live Mesh will also sync the information from cellphones and other devices.
You might well say, "Big whoop." File syncing and message exchanging are the sorts of features offered by any number of garage-shop Web 2.0 companies over the past few years. One would expect Microsoft simply to build those capabilities into Windows and get on with something more interesting.
To be fair, there is more to Live Mesh. It's also designed to be a complete software tool kit that outside programmers can use to write their own cloud applications, making it akin to an operating system that lives online.
This is what is called in the tech world a platform. Then again, cynics might say that software companies build platforms when they have run out of ideas for applications.
In Microsoft's case, the company has a history of introducing overengineered, somewhat nebulous products that never really go anywhere. It's .Net strategy from the early 1990s was supposed to transform the personal-computing experience, much as Live Mesh is supposed to today.
But .Net ended up being essentially a revision of Microsoft's family of programming language -- useful for developers, to be sure, but a development that civilians can be forgiven for not noticing took place.
Like anyone else, I'd be happy to use Live Mesh once it's available if it solves a real problem, such as syncing phones and computers, better than anyone. But the thing about clouds is that they are ethereal, have blurry edges and are constantly changing. Computer users like the cloud, aka the Internet, because it provides choices that would never be possible from a single company.
The Web is the ultimate antidote to Windows-style technology lock-in. For that reason, it's not any tech giant but boutique outfits that often provide popular online programming systems, such as the widely used Ruby on Rails.
That is a problem not only for Microsoft, but for all big tech companies, because all of them are trying to turn the cloud into an extension of one sort of monopoly or near-monopoly: Microsoft with Windows, Google with search, the social networks with their command of time and eyeballs. They dream of users entering their clouds and never leaving, a case of heads being too much in the clouds for their own good.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120952063210255067.html?mod=hps_us_my_companies
