In an earlier post I mentioned how I thought that Microsoft’s MyPhone could be powered by Live Mesh and it would appear that there will be an update to the MyPhone software soon. Liveside had recently posted an article with screenshots of new features in Wave 4 and how it looks like Live Mesh will be moving to Windows Live. Some hard evidence that backs the ideas in this article is that Office Live is becoming part of Windows Live and so there is a need for more storage and a more powerful online storage service. If this is the case then it would appear that Microsoft have decided to only have one place for users to store all their information, files etc online; a needed improvement to the current situation.
Obviously SkyDrive will need to have increased storage for this to happen so what will we be looking at? Currently the largest free online storage service is ADrive with 50GB for free, I expect this would be the minimum size for an updated SkyDrive. I have filled up my Live Mesh account and there are quite a few files I would like to sync with my Live Desktop but can’t with the current size of only 5GB; I probably couldn’t fill up 50GB very easily.
Something else that I think needs to be added to Live Mesh is someway of accessing the drive from the PC without having to open up a browser. Having it as a virtual drive would make it far more useful and more of a competitor with some of the current free online storage services. With a virtual drive on a local computer it would make sense to allow developers to create plugins to really get the most out of an online storage service, maybe SkyDrive would make use of the Live Framework and allow users to run their own apps in it.
A final point I would like to point out is that if my prediction of a Windows Live Videos service coming in Wave 4 then I think a larger, more comprehensive and useful SkyDrive is needed if people are uploading videos to their Windows Live account. Lets hope there is some real innovation and expansion of the current SkyDrive service to make it the best way to store files online and keep them in sync across the web, computers and mobiles.
