Dominick Accattato, CTO Infrared5

So, I woke up this morning to see some posts about Microsoft Mesh, an online service that resembles another virtual desktop. Unlike many in the past, Microsoft is onto something and with their support, they could easily push this product into their sharepoint services etc…

However, recently I got invited to use Dropbox which is a file synchronization service that is still in beta. Here are the differences:

Mesh advantages:

1. you can view your files online
2. you get 5 gigabytes compared to dropbox’s 2GB
3. you can view your media files from anywhere (assuming you have silverlight on that computer)
4. you can share your files (only with windows live account holders)

Mesh Disadvantages:

1. will probably be sued by Mike Chambers (the original Mesh)
2. not integrated with the desktop
3. no revision history
4. uses silverlight 2.0 which doesn’t have widespread adoption yet (I could be proven wrong here, haven’t done my research)
5. can’t upload .pages files. Not sure if it’s totally their fault though cause google has trouble with that too!
6. Didn’t work with Camino browser.  Had to use firefox.

DropBox advantages:

1. it’s quick
2. allows you to share files with anyone, doesn’t restrict you to a certain type of account such as hotmail
3. files have revision history
4. integrated with the desktop
5. drag and drop
6. nice sharing interface

Dropbox disadvantages:

1. only 2GB of space
2. run by a young company (may not be a disadvantage though)

So what’s the winner?

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 4:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.