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Comment by GMoromisato | Hacker News Reader

I worked on both Lotus Notes and Groove. What's great about Ray is that he has the capacity and drive to be involved in every part of the project. He drove high-level business requirements and wrote code and also cared about icons and colors. But he did it all without arrogance and allowed his team to argue back when necessary.

In case anyone is interested, a while back I wrote about another Ray Ozzie project: Live Mesh: https://gridwhale.medium.com/live-mesh-and-the-future-of-com...

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Thank you for that story and thank you for your contribution. I remember Live Mesh vividly and admit I found parts of it awkward. The functionality I used the most and thought was far ahead of its time was the ability to use Remote Desktop with any computer in the mesh. I often controlled my home computer from work.

While it was technically possible to use a dynamic dns + insecurely forward the RDP ports, LM mostly just worked(tm). It's possible to do this today as securely with something like Tailscale but Live Mesh included all of the batteries and none of the headache. RIP Live Mesh. Thanks again

I appreciate this--thanks!

Yes, I think the Tailscale-style connectivity was a big benefit of Live Mesh; I wish we had pushed it further.

Live Mesh also didn't require you to sync everything to the cloud, in contrast to offerings today. The cloud was just another optional target.

Edit: the best replacement I could find that still exists is "Resilio Sync"

I was an early adopter of Live Mesh, and thought it was awesome. From the outside, it was mind-boggling that it didn’t gain traction.

You write about it as an idea that has been abandoned, but I think really it is an idea that has become distributed over other systems. iCloud Photos works essentially the same way Live Mesh implemented it. Apps use iCloud as a storage medium with built in backup and sync. Apps are collaborative by default now.

But I suppose I only had my own vision of the product as a user, maybe your aspirations go further.

You're absolutely right that all apps have evolved in the same direction, not necessarily because they were inspired by Live Mesh, but mostly because it's a pretty obvious/useful direction.

I think Live Mesh wanted to be the platform piece of that so that (e.g.,) iCloud Photos wouldn't have to implement that themselves. Moreover, it would allow users to have a unified management of the distributed system instead of dealing with each app separately. That's the part I miss.

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