Live Mesh: for now, a solution in search of a problem

In the long run, Microsoft's Live Mesh cloud-based service may be, as my colleague Preston Gralla writes, the future of computing.

But its current free beta incarnation feels like it was rushed out the door to take advantage of the troubled launch of Apple Inc.'s similar, $99-a-year launch of MobileMe service (formerly .Mac).

I installed and played around with Live Mesh today. This is what I found:

-- Live Mesh can only be installed on Windows PCs today. Mac sync is coming, but Microsoft has made no promises about syncing Linux PCs.

-- Live Mesh doesn't work yet with Windows Mobile device or any other smartphone, though the former has been promised. (Update: as of Thursday, you can login to Live Mesh via any smartphone browser at http://m.mesh.com and see and download shared files. There is no auto-synchronization to the smartphone and the other devices in the mesh won't 'see' your smartphone.)

-- Live Mesh Remote Desktop, which lets you view and take control of a remote PC, is just a rebranding of Microsoft's longtime Remote Desktop service. The latter is familiar to anyone who has helped troubleshoot the PC problems of an older family member hundreds or thousands of miles away. It's really useful, though the same problems remain. For instance, screen redrawing and refresh remains sluggish.

-- While you can view remote desktops using any browser, you need Internet Explorer in order to do basic things like drag and drop files on them. Since Live Mesh uses ActiveX controls that only IE supports, it's doubtful that Microsoft will be able to fix this.

-- File synchronization remains rudimentary and manual. There's no way, for now, to set Live Mesh to automatically harvest all of the .Doc files in My Documents into Live Mesh for backup purposes. Unless you're a heavy filesharer, you'll probably keep saving most of your files on your PC. But that means an extra step for every file you want to have synced. Judging by the commands greyed-out by Microsoft, some improvements may be on the horizon.

-- Uploading a 175 MB file to the Mesh took a few seconds, but downloading it to another device took 20 minutes. That makes the most obvious use of Live Mesh today -- a way to share photos and multimedia files with friends and family instead of trying to e-mail them and potentially running into size-related bounceback error messages -- less compelling.

All in all, Live Mesh reminds me of an episode last season of the CBS comedy, Big Bang Theory (clip viewable at CBS.com) in which the young Caltech-trained geniuses spend hours so that they can turn their lamp on and off from their laptop by sending digital commands that travel halfway across the world and back through the Internet.

"You know you can get one of those universal remotes at Radio Shack? They're really cheap," says the unimpressed neighbor girl.

What Live Mesh lets you do can already be done via a combination of e-mail, already-available Windows services, and USB thumb drives. Microsoft needs to show a lot more in Live Mesh before people will come running to it.