Back in the good old days, big software companies did big things. Little companies tiptoed around in the shadow of the platform makers, gaining enough speed to liftoff and attract enough attention to survive long enough to be acquired. Like the old movie studios of the 30’s and 40’s, the technology studios of the 80’s and 90’s built stars and played them off until the inevitable decline.
So it went with Microsoft, as the seeming invulnerability of Gates’ machine accelerated to the boundaries of global saturation. Though we tend to think of Google as the conqueror, the reality is that Microsoft has struggled most with itself, the victim not of decline but of lack of fuel — the very customers who created the megalith in the first place.
Everything changed with the Net. The platform wars, the browser wars, the widget wars — they’re all really battles in the grappling with the living, breathing, swarm that is the Web. Even the argument over whether Office is dead is bogus, a joke that became a conference that begat a series of endless reiterations of the first O’Reilly Peer-to-Peer conference known as Web 2.0. The stuff that went over the wire now goes over the air; the stuff that used to persist solely on the client now comes from G@d knows where in the Cloud.
I pick on the conferences because they are an easy target, whether large and self-important like the Web 2.0 Expo this past week in San Francisco or small and private smoke-filled rooms like the ones that may await us in Denver in August. An easy target when the guy who champions dataportability.org is nowhere to be seen on the panels of numerous sessions on dataportability, the legitimacy of standards baked in the dark having the same dubious odor it had when Microsoft and IBM tried the same thing back in the Web Services Wars.
So we grow to expect little of big companies, entrenched publishers, and the various gatekeepers that fester at the margins of this unruly beast of the Net. Google grew so fast we bought the laughable notion they weren’t attacking Microsoft with freeware, but it only seemed like a big company play after the fact, and even today is laughed off by so-called “enterprise” seers as a toy, albeit a collaborative one that can’t be duplicated by the incumbent without triggering self-destruction.
Instead, we watch big company plays emerging from virtualized roots, the Amazon services, the social media clouds, the endless “little” company dance of instability, VC stupidity, and media carbonation of the Valley. This is the universe of the little Duchies, the Fenwicks where media storms roll down through the hills and tumble past with names like Twitter and Friendfeed and Twhirl.
I’ll call them microbigs, because the media treats them like they’re big companies with little to lose and everything to gain. The microbigs can seem transcendent like Facebook or possessing the lifetime of a gnat like a thousand forgotten startups or neverwases, but nowhere are the range of possible outcomes more encapsulated than Twitter.
Twitter is a Rorschach test of a microbig. I see it as the most important enterprise event of the MicroBig era; others see it as SocMedBS. We’re both right, of course, but put your head down on the tracks and you’ll hear the superliner approaching: Live Mesh. Just when we thought it was safe…. Are the big companies back? Is it time once again to assemble the open source wagons? To whom do we look for authority in fighting this battle?
First, is Microsoft a big company? Sure, but composed of monolithic special interests or a fast-moving collection of microbigs orchestrated by a self-healing mesh. One from Column A, the Office group, secure in revenue via the corporate channel but increasingly undercut by virality — or one from Column B, Silverlight, secure in cross-platform transparency with a 100 million client gift horse in NBC’s Olympic coverage on the horizon.
Both poles are curiously hamstrung, Office by its size and historical association with pre-Web lock-in, Silverlight by its perception as a virtual iPod with nothing to play or project. And there’s the media, similarly hamstrung by the notion that the only play here is to stick the two together and move Office to the Web. The problem: that’s not a microbig, it’s a regular old big company.
Then there’s the mesh. Looks bigco in purpose, staffed by the new guard at Microsoft, the best and brightest of Redmond and the seedlings that trace back to Groove and forward to the intersection with telecom and hardware. But try an interesting thought experiment as we did on The Gillmor Gang, and throw Mesh lead David Treadwell a series of microbig scenarios, and the answer comes up yes.
First, the Coke Classic questions: When’s the Mac version? Two months. What’s the difference between this and FolderShare. Never mind that who cares about FolderShare to begin with. What about Sharepoint? What about Groove? No wonder there’s even a little doubtthat Microsoft can get traction with this, what with channel conflict left and right with its own flailing Net-grappling product lines.
Finally, the real questions: Does Silverlight intersect with Mesh to produce the Net OS? Answer: Yes. Treadwell calls it orthogonal and complementary. MicroBig language. Can Mesh support Twitter streams orchestrated by identity mapping via affinities and abstracted to devices across OS, mobile, and corporate divides via Silverlight? Yes, but it can do so much more. Yes, but I didn’t ask about WIndows. OK, yes. When?
Big company play at MicroBig velocity. Yes, and rather than yes, but.
Gillmor: Is this service intended to compete against or enhance, which is a good part of the question, Google and Amazon Web Services?
Treadwell: This service is a different level than Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services does a great job of providing what we sometimes call utility computing resources– the ability to do mass scale storage, computation, etc. This service doesn’t have anything that operates at that level
Gillmor: Well it sits on top of services that operate at that level.
Treadwell: That’s exactly correct.
Gillmor: So can you wire the two up? Can you sit on top of Amazon services and use Mesh services to synchronize and orchestrate them?
Treadwell: It would certainly be possible for somebody to create a virtual device of a sort that uses Mesh’s open protocols to use S3 as one type of device. We don’t have that support today, but again, by virtue of the open protocol, somebody could create such a device.
Gardner: If someone decides they didn’t want, for some reason, their content to go out through this platform, wouldn’t it be fairly easy for them to block it?
Treadwell: They could simply choose not to map the folder. Is that what you mean?
Gardner: Not the end user necessarily, but perhaps the large organization that’s got content.
Treadwell: I see your point. That’s one of the things we know we have to do a good job with Mesh; that is, to be IT-friendly, and to give IT control on what kinds of data can and can’t be stored on this thing. In addition, one of the things that we expect to do longer-term is to allow IT departments to operate their own cloud storage mechanisms, such that data owned by that enterprise would only be stored on that enterprise’s devices and that enterprise’s servers. They would never go to Microsoft and they would have complete control of that data.
GillmorGang 04.25.08
Yes? Yes. So what you’re saying is that Google is a microbig. Yes, did I say that? No, but I didn’t ask that either and the answer is still yes. Bottom line: Microsoft can’t gain and retain traction with Mesh unless the answers are yes.
Where we take this is even more interesting than whether it will be successful in Microsoft’s stated terms, that with a dominant client position on the desktop and a growing one in gaming, mobile, and corporate they will get the lion’s share of whatever becomes the coin of the realm (services.) Looking at Mesh as a data synchronization transport ignores its abilities to virtualize identity, permissions, information aggregation, realtime feedback loops, and other SocMedBS attributes that define the substructure of, for example, a Twitter-Mesh-Silverlight gateway to compete with GTalk/Twitter etc.
Imagine (not for long will it be ephemeral) an information bus that orchestrates the signaling of text, rich media, calendar, communications, transaction, and group location status under a social graph umbrella based in part on user-controlled behavior aggregation (gestures). Now imagine what Google needs to do to match this architecture and its overwhelming lead in connectors to existing hardware via Windows.
Google’s answer for now is no. There’s no need to attack Mesh directly, but rather continue to iterate on Officenomics while retaining its dominant leads in user credibility and advertiser cloud. But Microsoft can efficiently hybridize Google and other microbig services with the Mesh layer added, creating information bus fail-over to multiple streams (virtual devices) to insure enterprise levels of reliability and security.
Those who dismiss this SocMedBS should note that even without Mesh or a Silverlight installed base of sufficient size or a Twitter that can scale at the affinity level, we are already able to orchestrate multiple services at an adhoc level with tangible results. For example, Friday’s Gillmor Gang was carried simultaneously by a Ustream feed with live video from my studio in Daly City and graphics intermeshed with the conference call by Jerry Schuman in Los Angeles, a live chat with questions from a global audience, the concurrent Twitterstream, and members of the Gang including Robert Scoble by cell from Ansel Adams’ playground deep in Yosemite.
It’s another fine mesh we’re getting into. But we have to face the facts that choice is the only weapon we have for progress. Whether it’s someone trying to force a choice of who we are friends with, or guilt by association with other ideas and experiences, or any gatekeeping that isn’t in service of any of us, that is to be rejected and routed around until the obstruction clears. It’s time for us to act like the microbigs we can be, and, like Microsoft, just say yes.
Steve’s insights and questions are great but a summary would be great.
About Mesh vs Foldershare … the thing I hate about Foldershare is that it doesn’t update what’s inside a Word file. I have to give it another name before it syncs all the data inside the Word file.
Where Mesh is likely to fail is that, despite all the claims of being able to use the ’services you care about, the devices you care about’ etc you will only be able to use the services or devices that Microsoft cares about because they really haven’t grasped the cross-platformness that is necessary for this to work, and that’s because they have too much invested in their own platform.
Great read. Saw it on eWeek.
I only clicked here because the word “mesh” sounded sexy.
No longer.
I don’t mesh around.
Every once in a while, there’s an article that may seem harder or longer to read, but which is well worth the chew.
Those that come here for the bite-sized, snack-food-news walk away disappointed.
Those who can stomach it come out knowning they’ve gained some new insight hard to find elsewhere.
As for the style, I’m not a native english speaker, but I like Gillmor’s prose, a definitely different taste than ‘run-of-the-mill blogging’.
With Erick, Michael, and here Steve, those are indeed strong *voices* on TC, true to the Cluetrain insight.
All ornament and content dry.
@38: HILARIOUS!
I’m sorry. If I can’t scan your article to make sense of it – I’m not going to read it. Steve needs to learn to write for the medium or go somewhere else (like the bookstore).
The article is fine, and SG’s point well-taken. I don’t think MS can live up to the product vision. IF they can stay focused, it won’t even be relevant until 2010.
I’m starting to think I’m the only one with a laptop that is always with me.
No I am confused. Shouldn’t this post be on your Eweek blog? Or are you a writer for Techcrunch not, too?
too many words
If you are looking for a Live Mesh invite or have Live Mesh invites to share, I’ve set up a Mesh invitation sharing website at http://www.sharemesh.com
So far the odds are about 8:1 (1 invite for every 8 waiting).
Hmm….logo’s looking a little Silverlightish. Way to go MS designers.
Excellent writeup. Thank you. Posts like these should take some mystery out of Mesh and MS’s vision that masses simply can’t wrap their heads around.
A classic example of how-not-to-write. I gave up about halfway through.
What a truckload of payperpost bullshit!
It’s PDC 2003 all over again, they promised heaven, a techno revolution.
Five years later M$ stock hasn’t moved an inch and technology wise they’ve done nothing. .Net is a failure an so is silverlight, and vista, and live, and start, and on and on and on…
You need only look at Gillmor’s past lunacy to bet on the right horses, everything he says, bet against.
Was there some news or analysis buried somewhere in that novel?
OOOOOOOH….. i had never put 2 and 2 together and realized that the Gilmore Gang joining the TCrunch Network would result in Steve authoring for TechCrunch….. oh god this is too good to be true!
Steve, screw these idiots in the comments who don’t understand that when someone smarter than them is talking they are to stfu and listen.
jeez. Awesome post… even though I still don’t get it, I now know that there are people who do. That gives me hope… then again, I use a Mac and grow less and less interested in anything Microsoft has to offer by the minute. Even if it is platform ambiguous or “in the cloud”.
All that matters to me about this post is that we get more Steve on TC!!!!! Such a unique voice, curmudgeonly as he may be, he’s just fun to read and god damned intelligent… this post did not feel very long at all… minus the “Yes? Yes. But no, however yes.” parts that did kind of make my brain hurt a little… but hey, I have not finished my coffee… I’ll blame that before I make insulting remarks toward someone like Steve.
All you jackanapes in the comment thread who are showing utter disrespect, I slap you with a trout. You are not talking to Duncan Riley here… show some damn respect.
great read, thanks.
I think I get it now. Mesh is the next Xanadu.
Wow, the web makes people dumb. “Give me my pre-chewed blog baby food in Top 10 link-bait form or I’ll poo in your comments and take my 2-second attention span elsewhere.”
Mesh is “synapse” from that movie “Hackers”. Real original.
Soooo…. I thought I’d leave a brief comment saying that this “new guy” seems to be an excellent writer and that I enjoyed creative phrases like “standards baked in the dark having the same dubious odor” and “the seeming invulnerability of Gates’ machine accelerated to the boundaries of global saturation”.
Then I see the 70+ comments decrying the use of big words and flowery language. And the references to Jane Austin (as if that commenter has ever read Austin or any classic literature to know of what he speaks). And the general malaise that fell upon said commenters as they struggled to engage their brain beyond their typical myopic 30-second samples of CollegeHumor.
And I’m at once both irritated and pleased. I see how an intelligent man like this Gillmor guy cuts through so much with this article, and yet, how so few are capable of understanding it. We have so much farther to go as a society.
But, then, as I write this, I’m reminded of one of my biggest pet peeves in the blogosphere and how Gillmor-esque writing may be the silent solution to one day ending tardo anonymous comments. TechCrunch has the oddest assembly of comments anywhere – gurus like Scoble mixed in with fools like JoeUser.
But maybe a blog that has a higher level of quality writing, not just highly sought after content, but content that is well-written (and humorous) can slowly make those JoeUser fiends disappear. They simply can’t engage what they don’t understand. Sort of a Jane Austin captcha.
Of course, if I had my two cents worth, it would be to mix both. I don’t even know who this guy is – or his thrice-linked-to Gillmor Gang, but we could use a little more of it from time to time, me thinks.
BTW, when I clicked the “About TechCrunch” link (before I saw Gillmor’s bio at the bottom) I didn’t see him. But I did notice some female CEO named Heather who was listed first? Huh? Who the heck is she and why is she at the top of the page above Arrington and Schoenfield, et. al.? Just because she’s the token CEO? If Mike got his girlfriend to sign her name on some state document, all well and good. But we don’t give a flying leap about her – certainly not with the first billing she got on that page.
Anyway, for those commenters who got lost with this, here’s your Twitter-esque summary: “Gillmor good, dumb commenters bad, Heather on bottom, Arrington on top”.
Yeah, I know. That sounded bad. Sorry. It couldn’t be avoided in the 140 character limit.
I agree with (what seems to be) the basic point: Mesh is good, however the writing is spectacularly, astonishingly bad. Really, really awful.
It truly scares me to think there are people out there that think that Gillmor makes any form of sense whatsoever.
It was the longest nonsensical haiku in the history of the form.
Was this article a waste of my time? Yes.
Was this story filled with made up terms that only exist to a microbig riding the SocMedBS bus to Officenomics? Yes.
Will I quit reading TechCrunch if they start trying to publish more junk like this?
The answer is a resounding yes.
I don’t care what the other 90% think – Steve’s insights are well worth the reading. Pity so many people can’t appreciate good literature.
I think I understood to article. Reading it was an excellent mental exercise when compared to the what I frequently read in similar posts. I do however get the feeling that there’s an elitist group here looking down their collective noses at those who find this type of writing daunting to make sense of. I think the suggestion of providing a clear summary of the post is valid. Someone with better writing skills and more familiar with the subject matter than myself should take this on. This is based on the assumption you want a wider audience to understand the information being discussed which I hope is the case.
I haven’t chuckled my way through a comment stream like this for ages.
I’m still over here thinking, “Steve’s writing at TechCrunch?” … Guess a week away from tech blogs really leaves one in the dark.
Write the way you like, Steve. I’d read you anywhere.
It’s all about context. Steve’s writing in a more proper Gillmor context (like on the Gillmore Gang) is more enjoyable than in a TechCrunch context. While he wrote a thought provoking piece, I didn’t come to TechCrunch for “thought provoking”, I came for some down time catch up on my news bytes. I don’t always agree w/Steve’s perspectives, but do appreciate the thoughtfulness behind his posts (though I do occasionally get annoyed by the self aggrandizing tone and style, almost patronizing or belittling the reader…kinda reminds of Diane Chambers fm Cheers!). Anyway, I’m guessing his posts will come in moderation given the visceral reaction fm a large number of the posts.
“Anyway, I’m guessing his posts will come in moderation given the visceral reaction fm a large number of the posts.”
Oh, I get it now. You guys think you have some _power_. That’s pretty interesting. This reaction is all pretty interesting.
Mesh = good, Thank god. Microsoft may still eventually die into the shadows but I have a feeling this Yahoo! deal will become more and more interesting – especially if the deal is a hostile takeover, that will ruin employee retention and Yahoo! will basically be a Yahoo!less company………..Poor Microsoft
Hate to be crass, but MS is really good at building a thousand free things, but it only makes money on about four: Windows, Office, SQL and Exchange. Where’s the money? At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about, especially for MS. Will commercial t?rds drop through the mesh onto every personal interaction?
In his long-winded podcast where he shouted down Prokofy, Steve Gillmor reminded me of Rush Limbaugh. He doesn’t understand Twitter at all, refuses to use @username to reply, and yaks on and on about his dopey “track methodolgy” to monitor mentions of his name.
Arrogant. Pompous. Long-winded. Prolix.
i.e., old fashioned “command and control” mentality.