LiveMeshLogo60 mobileme

When MobileMe was announced at Apple’s WWDC last week, a number of bloggers and Tweeters suggested it was akin to Live Mesh. A few asked me to give my thoughts on this and I eventually did over at Hexus in response to Scott Bicheno’s post.

First let me say there are people in Redmond eminently more authoritative on the topic of Mesh. One reason for the lack of real comparison is that beyond the coverage from WWDC about MobileMe there isn’t a great deal of information on the architecture etc. Contrast this with the in depth information you can get from Channel 9 and the Mesh blog and forums and you’ll begin to understand why it’s hard to make an apples for apples comparison :) Until there is more information, the best I can offer is what I posted in response to Scott. I’ve highlighted what I think is a key point that lies at the heart of the difference between these two products.

One final thing….please read my response before you jump back with the “oh it’s the Microsoft guy criticising Apple”. Far from it – I like what they have done and my aim is to explain the differences.

 

the comparisons with Live Mesh are inevitable but there are some definitive differences that the casual observer - not you Scott :) - could miss.


before I go in to that though, I would agree that what Apple has done here is package a cloud offering up pretty nicely for consumers. A number of questions remain in my mind about their service in particular but I'll save that for another time.
Since you mentioned Amazon, I'd also point out that AWS provides more of a utility compute service to developers whereas Mobile Me is much more of a "finished" or end user oriented service.


Live Mesh is a mixture of both. The  (Live Mesh) application many have seen is but one example of how the underlying Mesh platform could be used. Given there isn't a lot of detail on the platform available it's logical that many people have focused on comparing Mesh and Mobile Me thinking they're tackling the same problem. They sort of are but one way to think of it is that MobileMe could be "built" on Mesh. Unlikely of course, but the opposite isn't true. MobileMe (as far as I can tell) isn't a platform. That's not to say it isn't useful, I just wanted to point out that Mesh and MobileMe are not synonymous.


I need to find out more about Mobile Me before I could offer a more detailed comparison but I hope this helps for now.
meantime, Joe Wilcox has written an excellent comparison at Microsoft Watch and touches on many of the points I would make about Mobile Me so no point in repeating him :)

 

hope that helps! I ought to track down what Steve Gillmor thinks as he seems to “get” Mesh.