Mash or mesh?
Two interesting ideas crossed the desk today - Intel's Mash Maker and Microsoft's Live Mesh. The one allows you to collate different information on one platform, the other allows central information to be spread across different platforms.
Ah, but if only it were that easy... I struggled with Mash Maker for a while, without successfully implementing any useful combinations at all. And Mesh simply isn't available to anyone outside the US yet - although even if it were, it seems to be restricted at present to Vista or XP only. So, no progress on either front. But as both are really just beta's right now, I'm not too disappointed: past experience shows that by the time they are ready for the mainstream, there will be sufficient info and support out there make them usable: they need that sort of help to succeed, given the increasingly diverse and complex information environment out there. It's not that there are particularly new or high barriers to implementing new ideas, it's just that there are so many of them hitting us on a frequent basis that only those which can be grasped easily seem to take off.
It's easy to come up with a lot of examples of successful products or concepts - in communication, blogging and Twitter represent just how easy it can be to get ideas across. In commerce, PayPal and eBay showed how simple ideas can succeed. In contrast, the complex and difficult to understand stuff is at best relegated to backwaters and niche markets: just look at the relative popularity of Lotus Notes/Domino versus SQL Server or (and here's where the ton of bricks come flying at me) Linux versus Windows. Sorry, Open Source fans - but if Linux had been as simple as Windows to get going several years ago, it's likely that it would have had a better foothold than it has yet achieved; I'm not saying it won't eventually become at least as prevalent as it's more commercial competitors, but I feel it still has some way to go before it can be classed as equally popular. The whole concept of Microsoft Windows is keeping it (relatively)simple, at least as far as an OS can be: when it fails, it may be both spectacular and expensive, but I still recall with absolute clarity my first battles with Linux (an early Mandrake distro), and the problems I had writing my own graphics routines just to get X11 working.
I suppose Apple has taken the perceived simplicity to the extreme, enabled by the near-absolute control over hardware - and look how popular that is with the fans. The rest of us are inhibited by the price of Apple's products, from which I take that there must be more under the bonnet than is immediately apparent, but we can't deny that it is both neat and effective. A one button mouse is all it needs - just try running Windows like that (yes, I know, you can do nearly everything with the keyboard, but who remembers all the complex key combinations? Point made, I think).
So I'll watch the mash and mesh over the next few months, see what if anything develops - and then see how much we're going to be charged to for the right to manage the appearance and location of data again. Because there's one thing both systems have in common - they both want some sort of central control over your data, be it as communal mashups, or central data storage - and the idea is that we'll willingly pay someone to take that load off our minds.
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