Marc's Voice

Will Microsoft connect their Live Mesh to our Open Mesh?

I’m finalizing my book “How to build the Open Mesh” and Mary Hodder suggested that I add some Appendices on how various BigCos are building THEIR versions of the open mesh.  The full title of this Appendix is “Will Microsoft connect their Live Mesh to our Open Mesh and what about the rest of Microsoft?”

So here is Appendix - C

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Live Mesh totally rocks and it’ll probably become  a key element of our open mesh.  It’ll gateway us to mobile, car, living room, game machines.

Dare Obasanjo and Angus Logan are proving that a smart, focused MS can play open just as good as the rest of them.  From the Live.com world MS is setting standards for what mainstream open will look like.  Game kids, parents in cars, kiosks in malls, churches, local government and the family in the living room are MS’s users.  We need to mesh into them.

Kim Cameron delivered what he promised and Ray Ozzie is five years out ahead.

Live Mesh’s greatest dangers are MS itself.  What’s not clear is how the Live Mesh will connect into Facebook, but the power of a $50B warchest will keep MS in this game.

Watching MS play open is fun - cause it’s been a long time coming.

How is Yahoo building the Open Mesh?

I’m finalizing my book “How to build the Open Mesh” and Mary Hodder suggested that I add some Appendices on how various BigCos are building THEIR versions of the open mesh.

So here is Appendix - B.

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Yahoo probably has the most comprehensive, well architected approach towards building their own open mesh.  They’ve left lots of room for us without getting in our way.  Now they just have to execute those plans!

Enabling OpenSocial gadgets (or any other kind of widget) inside of any Yahoo property and providing a rich set of APIs into an underlying ID layer  is pretty dam coolio. Any ID system, social networking platform or web app should be able to  seamlesslly mesh into the 150M Yahoo strong.  What Flickr did for photos, so will Y! OS do for the open mesh.

As a modern day media entity Yahoo can show the world how  content + technology + open can mean monetization for all.  What I especially like is their leadership in supporting structured content and making sure that its all standards based.

Yahoo is poised to come back in a big way if they can execute this architecture correctly.