Microsoft has never had a unified approach to online storage and sync, but it appears as though this is finally going to change. In the latest beta release of Windows Live Essentials 2011 Microsoft released a utility called Live Sync to help users manage folders across more than one PC, but this is going to be renamed yet again to Live Mesh before the final release later in the year. Just in case you’re having a hard time following the name changes, and we wouldn’t blame you if you did, Live Sync and Mesh until recently were two very different approaches to the common problem of maintaining folder sync across the Internet.
The indecision within Microsoft over which product would end up being their long term sync solution drove many users such as myself into the arms of Dropbox, but perhaps this official show of commitment will be enough to convince others like me to give it another try. It sounds as though the original concept for Mesh will remain intact, but it will be receiving a storage bump up to 5GB along with various performance enhancements.
Oddly enough Mesh.com still sports a full page ad advising users to go checkout Live Sync, but I suppose we can’t expect them to get their act together overnight now can we?