my all-time fav letter-to-the-editor was in computerworld about 20 years ago. it was titled "congratulations on your one millionth article on the demise of the mainframe". the blogosphere's prolific opinionizing may have topped that feat in the 12 hours following microsoft's live mesh announcement. the gist of the criticism runs something like, "ok, it's cool and all, and we like ray ozzie, but the pc is dead so live mesh is irrelevant." the assumption is: the cloud has absorbed the application, or will real soon now. here's why i don't buy it. first, in 2008's version of reality, we don't have the bandwidth to pull it off. both upstreaming and downstreaming high-volume content taxes our current capabilities. cloud followers would respond that, any moment now, the sky will part, the birds will sing, and we'll have wireless terabyte pipes to every square inch of the globe. i remain sceptical. but let's say they flip the uber-reliable-unlimited-bandwidth switch tomorrow. i still take issue with the live mesh naysayers based on humanity's magpie obsession with shiny objects. we like high-function devices. no one gets excited about a terminal - we want toys that do something. we display our coolness by the gadgets we keep. egalitarian clouds miss the point. monopolists and zealots care about the brand; be it windows or what. normal people just want it to work. if microsoft makes it work, ray (and steve, and bill) win.