November 20, 2008

FolderShare, Live Sync, Live Mesh???

Ok, it is has been two years since Microsoft bought ByteTaxi's FolderShare and rebranded it as Microsoft FolderShare. Aside from keeping it running, putting the Mac version on life support, and killing off the fee-based "pro" version, they haven't done much. But today I received the email below from their team.

WTF? How could MS be pushing Live Sync and Live Mesh at the same time when the products are nearly indistinguishable??? And with each not mentioning the other and without any indication of how users should decide which product to use. Does Microsoft know that they are investing in two very similar and competing products?

And to abandon their existing customers with no automatic transition path, and to warn them they will probably not even be able to get in, and that they should manually copy the names of their folders and sharers onto what, paper? Plus, I'll make a bet that the reason for this is so that they can abandon mac support without ever saying so.

FolderShare runs on the mac - but the encryption is totally broken so you have to run it without encryption, and it is an old pre-Intel binary so it runs only in the emulator and hogs a huge amount of processor time.

Live Mesh, which theoretically runs on the mac has a bug so it works great - as long as you only want to share folders on your desktop. I can't get it to share any other folders. (Yes, I have reported this, but to no avail).

And there still is no paid "pro" service - which is probably the one MS service I *would* pay for.

Oh, and it is still "beta" after two years of buying ByteTaxi and being version 2.0.

Sigh...

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