Posts by Michael Gartenberg from April 23, 2008

Michael Gartenberg | April 23, 2008, 09:06 AM
Live Mesh has the vision

Microsoft finally took the wraps off Live Mesh and this one's going to be important. It's important because it takes all that information living on multiple devices and screens and allows it flow seamlessly from place to place and device to device. It's a concept we've talked about for a while (latest report here). I've said before that whoever controls the sync point for content between screens and devices is going be a big winner. Live Mesh has nailed the vision, the challenge is how quickly they can implement this into something real and how many platforms beyond those that Microsoft offers directly they can embrace. I'm going to install the beta in a little bit and report back on how well it performs for the desktop aspects.

Good video and demo of Ray Ozzie talking about Live Mesh here. Demo of the Live Mesh app here.

Michael Gartenberg | April 23, 2008, 08:59 AM
MSN takes on final shot at users from the grave

It's been a little while since we've said RIP to MSN Music but now there's a nasty surprise from beyond the grave, where music services go to die. Seems that if you were foolish enough to have purchased songs from MSN Music, after August 30th MSFT will no longer new authorization keys for that music which means that it's now locked onto whatever computers you have it on. If you buy a new PC or need to change or update the operating system, you're simply out of luck. Bad move here... really bad move.

This could have (and should have) been handled so many different ways (after all, how many people really bought songs from MSN Music) and Microsoft could have bought some good will instead of what's no doubt going to be said about them today. Hey folks over in Redmond. Give me a call if you'd like to talk about how you can avoid doing stuff like this in the future.