It struck me after reading the article that the company who has solved synchronization is Apple.

All of the data people really care about is on their iPhone/iPod. Contacts, photos, music, TV shows, movies, email, web access. When you think of it, iTunes main purpose is syncing and organizing your media. And with iTunes Store seamlessly syncs a lot of the data people care about from the Internet, also (for pay movies and music, but a lot of free podcasts, too).

While Microsoft continues to try to solve the synchronization problem as an abstraction, Apple has actually created something everyone uses because it Just Works.