We all know that Microsoft sucks when it comes to a consistent experience (they can't even get this right inside Windows, so why should we expect consistency and a great experience on the Web?) Branding? That's why Microsoft wanted Yahoo so badly. No one normal knows what Windows Live really means. It was stupid to extend the Windows brand onto the Web. - Robert Scoble
MS needs a class in Branding. They are a mess on the web. MSN? Live? Office Live? Who is running their internet marketing division? That person needs to be fired, someone needs to clear out all of that shit and start over. Just a complete mess!!! - Jacob Burke
That may be the reason they want Yahoo! that much. It's a pretty solid brand they could use to order the mess they now have. - Hernan Garcia via twhirl
Ah the YHOO thing makes much more sense know. I've never liked MSFT (Apple user) but as a marketer, their branding sucks. Releasing new products that are buggy and behave inconsistenly is also damaging in the the long run. - Sally Church via Alert Thingy
Microsoft suffers from the same lame strategy as the World Domination fanatics of yesteryear who wanted to own all the property available. By doing this, they've spread themselves too thin and the enemy has captured most of all of their castles!! stupids! - Susan Beebe
Everything MSFT do is ugly and clumsy, it seems. - John Clifton
Connecting Friends up is getting hot. I'll be at Google on Monday night to cover this stuff as it's announced. - Robert Scoble
Google may be more restrictive with your data, but that is good for your privacy. Some people won't like Facebook just giving your info away and trusting the site to play nice with it. FB certainly seems to have the upper hand in terms of users though. - Tanath
Exactly. And Twitter is one of the simplest tools. Friendfeed? Will be mainstream in the next generation. All aggregators are difficult and require knowledge and patience to use. Dopplr? Dunno if ever. - Francine Hardaway
I LOVE GEEKNPOKE. Did you know the creator is a German :)? - Timo Heuer
I still don't 'get' what Mesh is. If all it does is sync files, meh. I'm already short of bandwidth here (most of the connected world is), and don't want files flying around. - Yuvi
Wondering why scobleizer.com keeps giving my Firefox the hickups. It won't load, I need a refresh every time. Better start making backups with Live mesh ;-) - Alexander van Elsas
Yuvi it doesn't just sync files. It syncs anything. It's actually pretty cool and will enable new kinds of apps. That is, if it stays installed on my computer. - Robert Scoble
for once, I'll stay slightly behind the curve (or cliff) :-) - Scott Davies
I'm having really hard time trying to get why Joel hates Ozzie or Mesh so much... - Cem Catikkas
Just installed it and although I've lacked enthusiasm for most of MS's online initiatives, I think this one could be really cool. But yea, we all need more/cheaper bandwidth. - Phil Ashman via twhirl
while I agree with the web sentiment, I think real buzz will come from RIA style apps leveraging local processing and web connectivity (internet as infrastructure). - Tyler Hannan via twhirl
Robert - I guess I need to own up. I think you are wrong. I wrote about it here http://tinyurl.com/5fj7nb ... but here is the 2 cents version. Live Mesh won't fail because is has appeal in the Enterprise. The primary reason Russel 2000 companies are slamming in Sharepoint, Documentum, Interwoven, Stellent (now ORCL), etc is management of unstructured data. So just like Office won due to the Enterprise ... so will Mesh. An no, I am not a MSFT fanboy. - Tim Bauer
I'm on a Mac platform and don't use any buggy MS apps, thankfully! - Sally Church via Alert Thingy
@Tim the problem is that as more of our data and our applications are resident in the cloud the less need there is for sync (which is really 90% of Mesh is right now). Cloud apps already include sharing, collaboration, and versioning (the other 10%). Early adopters have already integrated this stuff into their lives. The final nail is that once again, Mesh is Microsoft-only for the time being. Sure we may get x-platform at some point but why wait when all the competition has already crossed over? - Kevin D. White
@KDW. I hear ya but until we all can walk around anywhere and have connectivity to the web and a S3 like repository ... Mesh is golden for the masses ... the bridge to Nirvana that the early adopters bleed to achieve. It is not hard to get Live Mesh into Enterprise shops that are MSFT. Then they will start building/playing with it. Then they will start replicating to their houses to work at night (if the security concerns get cleared). Wallah. Critical Mass. Fortunes are made from such manuevers. - Tim Bauer
"it's not hard to get Live Mesh into Enterprise shops." TRANSLATION: Windows 7.0. :-) - Robert Scoble
Sounds a lot like... Step 1: Bundle Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit. That strategy used to work but recently, not so much. I am more than willing to be proven wrong however. Just as soon as Mesh for Mac & iPhone & Google Apps gets released. - Kevin D. White
MESH is like Linux...only geeks will grab ahold of this new "cool" technology. Mainstream folks will not embrace this... same adoption rate as twitter; perhaps even less. - Susan Beebe
I think you are wrong on this one Robert. While this release may be light, developers are crazy excited about it... awesome stuff will come. - Soulhuntre via twhirl
I haven't looked into Mesh yet, but from what I gather this type of functionality is what I was thinking of at the introduction of the iPhone. At the time I was explaining to a friend about how it was another computing platform, and the limited storage and horsepower was a non-issue because people would have other PCs and media servers and that you only need to carry around a subset of your data. Mesh-like synching along mobile computing make for some interesting possibilities. - Cornelius Toole
I agree. Mesh is not interesting the way FF is - it is interesting the way Flash (or Silverlight) is - it is about what others do with it. I'm a prof at UW who works on one of the LHC experiments. I can think of a "socal" app that makes reading papers from the preprint archive a community thing. And perhaps FF will figure out how to read an activity feed from Mesh and then when someone reads and likes a paper an entry can show up in FF. I wouldn't do this for $$ (no time) and I sure as heck don't want to run a servier to deal with it - Mesh is perfect for that sort of thing. Sort of like what Amazon did, and then Google - each lowered the bar for entry for someone with an idea. For the sort of thing I'm thinking about, Mesh lowers the bar even more. - Gordon Watts
This is a spam website. I signed up for it and it said "You told us your Tube will have Adult Content - this is allowed on an affiliate site, ZazzleTube.com but not on StartYourTube.com. Your account has been created there.". I didnt even choose adult content. - Ernest Semerda
Bait and switch? Wow that model works everywhere... - Anthony Farrior
Interesting story, although I'll grant it's one-sided at this point. I explored a bit and stumbled upon the original Flickr video (embedded in the post) as well as the picture with the text explanation of what happened. - Ontario Emperor