Windows Live Mesh

» see mesh.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

live mesh was on every windows machine i touched during the late-university and early-work window around 2010-2012. i had it on the desktop tower at home and the laptop i carried around campus, and for a while it was the least bad way to keep the same set of folders on both without emailing zip files to myself. dropbox existed by then but it was still a smaller upstart. mesh came with windows live. the account was already there.

the interesting piece of mesh was that it did not need everything to route through the cloud. it could sync two of your own machines directly, up to 200 folders and 40 gb per file, using the microsoft servers only as a rendezvous point. the 5 gb cloud storage was a secondary thing. remote desktop over the internet was tucked in the same client, so from a coffee shop wifi i could pull a file off my tower at home without exposing rdp to the open port scan crowd.

microsoft announced the shutdown 13 december 2012 for 13 february 2013, folding everything into skydrive. skydrive kept the cloud-storage half. it did not keep the direct pc-to-pc sync, and remote desktop went with mesh. the migration path was "copy your mesh-synced folders into your skydrive folder and everything you own now lives on our servers instead of also on your machines." that trade was not equivalent, and a lot of the people who liked mesh specifically for the peer sync ended up on dropbox or bittorrent sync inside the year.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the origin ~

live mesh came out of ray ozzie's group at microsoft, launched as a technology preview at mix08 in april 2008. ozzie had come in from the lotus notes and groove networks world, and mesh had the same shape as those: peer-first with a server on the side, not server-first with peers as clients. the preview iteration was called just live mesh; the folded-in-with-windows-live release in september 2010 was windows live mesh 2011.

~ the death ~

microsoft did not officially call it a death. it called it a consolidation. the two products it had running in the same category (live mesh and skydrive) were converging on skydrive, and the surviving product kept the more marketable half of both. remote desktop moved to standalone remote desktop for windows. the peer-sync feature was quietly cut for good. skydrive got renamed to onedrive in 2014 after a british sky broadcasting trademark loss, and the modern onedrive still does not sync directly between your own machines without a server round trip.

~ what got buried with it ~

the pc-to-pc part is the small thing that matters here. a home network with a laptop and a tower and a shared work folder used to be the default setup for anyone with a desk job or a hobbyist habit. mesh solved that shape of problem cheaply. the successors solved a different shape of problem: personal cloud storage that follows you between devices, on the assumption you no longer have a home network of your own. the shift from "sync my machines" to "sync my files onto microsoft's machines" happened around this transition. it was not a technical necessity. it was a business preference. mesh was the last microsoft product to treat your local network as a first-class citizen.

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