Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By David Aronchick
You’ve got to hand it to MS – no one is better at hiding the best, most interesting features when it comes to “wow” for different audiences. I think of Powershell for infinite CLI programability, Homegroup (in Windows 7) for instant sharing, even the simple (but ultra cool) Outlook date converter. They pulled off another one with the release of the Windows Live Sync Beta last week.
I’ve been a long long time user of Windows Live Sync, back to the early days of Foldershare… I actually paid for it! It’s an incredibly useful tool – I sync my browser favorites, my documents and all my photographs to every computer I own, and, presto, I have an instant virtual desktop and backup solution. There have been some annoyances, but I tout it to everyone I can possibly get in front of. You can keep your DropBoxes, Box.net, SugarSyncs, etc – all that matters to me is peer-to-peer from any folder on my machine, and that’s what Live Sync gives me for free.
When the new version came out, there had been a lot of belly-aching about reducing online storage, and functionality changes since they merged Mesh and Live/Skydrive and Live Sync, but those users were using Live Sync for the wrong thing. If they wanted storage in the sky, there were a lot of other solutions for it and these changes basically just revealed a fraudulent market that Live Sync had succeeded in winning. But the real genius of the new Live Sync is that it instantly transforms the same old Windows you’ve used forever into a machine in the cloud – with nearly all of the benefits thereof.
There have been countless pieces recently about how the cloud will overtake a little/a lot/everything when it comes to startups/games/processing/etc, even in this very space. And it is nearly impossible to overstate how much cloud computing will change the way IT is done for companies large and small. The question is, what happens to the hundreds of millions of machines out there with multi-gigahertz processors and yottabytes of hard drive space when everything is in the cloud? The answer is that they become a cloud too, and this Live Sync is the toe in the water for that.
How’s that you say? How can you read all that in from a single little set of features? Well, it’s not much, but you can see where things are going. Built into Live Sync are:
1) A device independent storage system (including your phone)
2) A remote desktop/control capability
3) A method for synchronizing not just files but actual application settings
4) A web site to provision and control them all
Add a way to share processing power and you’ve got a cloud. Sure it’s not going to make the top500 (http://www.top500.org/) list, but could it speed transcoding of high quality content to your new device? Sure. Could it provide an instant backup solution? Absolutely. A distributed database for all your friends and relatives contacts, emails and history? You bet. But the coolest ideas are the ones that are so off-the-wall, we haven’t even thought of them yet – SETI@Home on steroids.
Make no mistake, there’s lots left to do. Beyond the distributing of the processing, there’s implementing the user scenarios that make this work. And, there’s building an SDK to wire all that goodness up so that devs can build greatness with Visual Basic. You’ll see lots more movement here as well – Google will almost definitely make a move here with their toolbar/chrome browser/chrome OS as well. The future is cloudy – and it’ll be rolling in to a desktop near you, shortly.
