Windows Live Mesh: 2.2 petabytes served
Microsoft says its 3 million Windows Live Mesh users have synced 2.2 petabytes to Microsoft's cloud. The service exits beta at the end of this month.
Microsoft has issued a progress report on its Live Mesh sync tool since it was wrapped up with the Live Sync tool last year, saying that it's now being used by 3 million people who have connected 5 million devices. Collectively that amounts to 2.2 petabytes of data, the company said in a blog post today.
Microsoft first launched Live Mesh at the Web 2.0 Expo in 2008 as an ambitious sync service aimed at ferrying data across a number of devices, be it PCs or Macs. It's since gone on to become a part of Windows Live Essentials, Microsoft's suite of free software tools.
Along with the update about how many people were using the tool, Director of Windows Live product management Dharmesh Mehta took a healthy swing at Google, without actually naming the company:
This marks an important moment in the steady transition to a world where people will use a blend of cloud services & PC-based apps together. As a company, we believe this trend will continue as people seek a personal balance in how they manage their data across multiple devices and services.
This is in contrast to those who believe that it's a cloud-only world and that everything should and will live online. It's a simple idea, but our customers tell us they want a choice in what works best for them.
Zing!
There is one footnote here about the choice issue though; that being the expiration of Live Mesh's beta at the end of this month. With that change ends support for Windows XP. Users first learned of the March 31 beta deadline for that change shortly after the announcement that the tool had been finalized.