Architects of Disaster
News of the last few days leads many to wonder if the leaders in the software and hardware world ever bother to look up from their tasks at hand to see what anyone else is doing.
Just yesterday we learned of the Microsoft idea of Mesh, which with all the problems the company has had lately, it is hard not to take the cheap shot and call it Microsoft Mess. The idea, put forth by Ray Ozzie, the man charged with charting the course, now that Bill Gates is on to other things, sounds intriguing, in a Star Trek-on-our-way-to-a-perfect-world sort of way. The Mesh will be a uniting of local and distant assets, allowing each person to achieve much more than the box before them would otherwise enable. Many items in the Mesh are already partially in place, or have precursors on the way, such as the ‘Live’ programs offered now. At first this seems like a logical extension of Active Desktop, from back in the Windows 9x days, but it is much more.
The problem is how much stress it will place on the Internet. With many people working online, accessing non-local information so frequently, it will create unknown amounts of strain on a system experiencing its own growing pains, with the coming changeover to IPv6, and the addition of so many new things claiming IP addresses, from refrigerators to washing machines, to mobile devices in our vehicles.
The backbone of the internet needs updating in order to accommodate the traffic of today, and will need to be continuously increased in capacity if it is ever to allow the ‘cloud computing’ that many envision. How this will happen is not yet well defined, as the task seems almost Herculean in size and scope. One bad move and the information highway will experience gridlock worse than the rubbernecking caused on I-405 when Britney Spears decides to shop in the Valley.
It looks like plan for Mesh is a good idea, but the implementation will require so much cooperation over such an extended period that it truly seems like pie-in-the-sky.
Tags: mesh, microsoft, ray ozzie, backbone updates, internet expansion, ipv6 implementation, active desktop
