Naive Joel on Mesh

re: Naive Joel on Mesh

Rob Moir — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:10:39 GMT

Actually, I agree with Joel. Mostly because I wrote more or less the exact same post as him a few days ago (see link).

What does Mesh actually _do_? What problems does it solve that real people outside of the geek subculture actually have?

re: Naive Joel on Mesh

Craig — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:01:16 GMT

Lets be honest, Mess is a desperate example of Microsoft trying to keep the desktop and other fat clients relevant. I willing to bet anyone a slab of beer that two years from now Mess will have gone the way of the Dodo.

re: Naive Joel on Mesh

John — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:52:48 GMT

You should check out the comments on Reddit. The consensus there is that sync is like backup: super important, but not something anyone will ever actually bother with until it is simple. DEAD simple-- NO configuration, NO headaches, no nothing, ever, for any reason.

The instructive example is Apple's Time Machine for backup.

"Building a platform" is exactly the wrong approach for sync. Too complicated, too much hassle, too much to think about. Nobody wants to think about sync or ever take even the slightest action to make it happen. It just needs to happen, magically. Microsoft is overengineering the problem.

re: Naive Joel on Mesh

Ashutosh Galande — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:29:10 GMT

Re: Craig,

I agree that sync should be pervasive. In fact AFAIK, Mesh sync pretty much is. The only thing you need to do is to specify which folder to syn and that's it.

As for building platform, it is orthogonal to to having sync pervasive. What the platform does is that it simple let's anybody write an equally good application on top of Mesh.

Re: Rob,

Mesh let's me write an application which can access any of my files from anywhere. I don't know of any platform that lets me do that unless the files are stored on the web to begin with.

re: Naive Joel on Mesh

Rob Moir — Thu, 01 May 2008 23:05:11 GMT

Ashutosh, what about Apple's .mac? That does the same thing already, so the best you can say about Mesh is that it's ".mac .net" - cheap pun but I can't resist those. Or perhaps considering who is behind it, I could also call it Groove.net

Now there's nothing wrong with that, .mac .net could be very useful, but it isn't the groundbreaking paradigm shift in computer science that some of the early hype seems to imply.

And the thing is, whatever we call it, it just doesn't seem that compelling. Sticking with .mac, some people find it very useful indeed but a large portion of mac users have lots of fun with their macs without any need or interest in .mac. What will happen when this opens up to everyone? Much the same I think. Of those people who are interested, might they actually be annoyed by Mesh, because it's actually something that should have happened before... not because Microsoft could have copied .mac any time, but because it's "obvious" and Microsoft should have done it years ago and Apple shouldn't be charging for their version of it.

re: Naive Joel on Mesh

Ashutosh Galande — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:00:24 GMT

Rob,

It's not about mounting my iDisk on my Mac or PC. Its about mounting my C:\ on to the web. There's a big difference.

What will happen to mesh is for us to wait and watch but as you can tell I'm optimistic. :)

Round-up

Someone Else — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:24:31 GMT

I just wanted to quickly gather up some links to articles I've found interesting of late. First of