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blowdart wrote:

See the whole thing just smacks of not talking to everything.

Right now we have hosted grove. Nothing more. Is this all Ray Ozzie can see?

Remote Desktop? Well my laptop has a routable IP, so I can RDP in driectly. I also have a Windows Home Server which also routes in to allow RDP to remote desktops. And now I have a third way to RDP in (which I can't find the option to switch off once it's installed). So 3 methods to remote desktop.

File Sync? Well we have MSN, we have Groove, we have FolderShare and now we have Mesh. And none of them use Vista's sync centre.

So what the heck is going on here? Does no-one talk to each other? What was the point of Vista's sync centre if it's not going to be used for what it's meant for, syncing things between devices?

In a lot of Microsofts new offerings, both on Vista and Live, you have a lot of things that are similar that are disconnected from each other and it makes things really messy.

In Vista you have Explorer and then special ways to explore specific types files in Photo Gallery and Media Player. Then when you download Live Photo Gallery, you have two applications sitting on your computer, Photo Gallery and Live Photo Gallery. I'm not sure why you need two installed at once.

We can also talk about the network control panel windows, where we have five or more control panel windows that all replicate the same content in different forms.

Very few of the Live services are also integrated, except through Spaces. I would like the same scratchpad thats in Image search in the regular search, and then you could have a button to move all the links in scratchpad to Live Favorites.

Or why not even a direct links for these thinks installed on the IE context menu? Like Add to Live Favorites, Save in SkyDrive, etc.

Instead the Live Toolbar we have is just a mess of buttons that do nothing but provide links or synchronize, and make the browser look uglier with another mess of buttons.

That seems to be  the design strategy with IE, even continuing with IE8, pile on messes of buttons and menu options. Enable activities and webslices with a smart tag like popup which completely replicates everything on the context menu.

So now none of these services use Sync Center, which I have no idea why is a separate control panel from Mobile Device Center, and the cloud space we have on Mesh has no way of taking advantage of the services in SkyDrive if you want to link those two together, to say have a folder on your computer sync with a publically shared folder.

Talking about Remote desktops, there are a lot of good reasons for them, but other times you would want to just access a remote location as if it were a networked device. It would be a good feat if Microsoft could somehow make these two types of access work seamlessly together.

As for the Remote desktop, it would make more sense for it to appear full screen, having the mesh info overlay on the side of the desktop and auto-hide

I just think that if we are looking at whats good about Mac vs Windows, you have to seriously look at the mess Microsoft is creating for users with dozens of ways to do things that are all unintegrated.

Microsoft used to be known for its attention to integration, now it has a bunch of solutions that don't work together.

And aren't some of the Windows Live services replicated in Office Live?

And the folder sharing replicated in Live Messenger's shared folders?

Will these all be reconciled?