Parasnis said the idea for Live Mesh came as Microsoft noticed several key trends, including the Web becoming more pervasive as a hub for applications and becoming increasingly more important for users and developers because of the multitude of devices using the Web as a rich computing platform. However, the devices have boundaries, and getting one's applications to run across their devices and other computing environments has been a hassle.

Live Mesh has four main components: a mesh platform or software-plus-services fabric, known as a "mesh operating environment," that provides a digital blueprint of the overall device mesh; a physical cloud service environment in the data center; a software component of that architecture or client platform that will connect with the cloud services; and a set of platform experiences.

In a memo to Microsoft employees, Ozzie said: "To individuals, the concept of 'My Computer' will give way to the concept of a personal mesh of devices—a means by which all of your devices are brought together, managed through the web, as a seamless whole. After identifying a device as being 'yours,' its configuration and personalization settings, its applications and their own settings, and the data it carries will be seamlessly available and synchronized across your mesh of devices. Whether for media, control or access, scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment will be unified and enhanced by the concept of a device mesh."

Patrick Kerpan, chief technology officer at Cohesive Flexible Technologies, said he has high expectations for the Live Mesh technology. The interesting question about the mesh will be, "What is its deployment form factor?" Kerpan asked "A piece of CLR [Common Language Runtime]?  A Hyper-V virtual machine?  A precompiled code module more like the Google App Engine?  How 'visible' will Windows Server be—if at all—or am I calling services both WS and RESTfully?"

He said that for CohesiveFT, "we built our Elastic Server platform with these eventualities in mind, so we are excited and ready to be 'enmeshed.'"