Joel's blog is one of the best resources on the net for software development. I find myself agreeing with him most of the times but his latest post on Live Mesh didn't come out to be as insightful as some of his others.

If you take out his histrionics, Joel’s premise is that MS is wasting too many resources in solving the problem of synchronization which doesn’t even exist to begin with. His logic is that synchronization must not be an issue as you don't see people flooding numerous other services that provide similar functionality.

So what's Microsoft doing different with Mesh?

One thing I love about Microsoft is that it never stops at writing an app. It always tries to make a platform out of it. Microsoft's past successes have come from generating a critical mass of ISVs around its technologies to create a whole ecosystem of software and solutions. And that's what I see is being done differently in case of Mesh. Sure there are a zillion other applications out there that sync your files across but none of them was written with a vision to make every desktop and device out there a first class citizen of the Net.

Our desktops and other devices (e.g. phone) are like big silos of applications, data and information. They exist as isolated entities that connect to the net primarily through browser. That's the reason we see a crop of these web based applications (even a so called OS) that hardly integrate closely with the rest of my desktop. I think Mesh is trying to break that model and open up those silos so that all my devices and their content is always accessible to me wherever I am.

Sure there are issue like security and access control that would be paramount in such scenarios and I'm sure folks over in Mesh team are thinking hard about it. Frankly, I haven't yet wrapped my head around all the concepts of Mesh but from whatever I have seen it looks a bit too sophisticated to be dismissed as just a file sync app.