This year, Microsoft has started pushing SkyDrive aggressively. So it was apparent that its previous file sync service called Live Mesh, was nearing the end of its days.
Today in a blog post, Microsoft declared that Live Mesh would be officially retired on 13th February, 2013. That does give users two months to move to other cloud storage and sync options. Obviously Microsoft is pitching its own SkyDrive service for PC and mobiles phones.
SkyDrive cannot exactly have all the features of Live Mesh. Live Mesh supported remote desktop experience too, allowing users to access files and apps remotely. But the alternatives are built into Windows 8 Pro and Enterprise platform.
Is SkyDrive good enough?
According to Microsoft’ claim most Live Mesh users are on SkyDrive. Today only about 25000 active users are there on Live Mesh. That is a seriously small number but it claims that million did use it at some point of time.
I do have SkyDrive installed on my laptop running Windows 8 but I basically end up using Dropbox and Google Drive. For working online, I only use Google Drive and it makes sense with the integration of Google Documents and recently added features like annotations on images.
SkyDrive is a decent sync service but many people who own multiple devices and need their files synced are not using Windows platform. This does make SkyDrive not very useful to many. SkyDrive’s popularity on Android and iOS is probably negligible and that is its big challenge.