Microsoft is currently developping 10 different applications to do the same damn thing

Saying that all of those apps are the same is a naive interpretation of the services. There's overlap, but that's because a lot of those products started out with disparate purposes and are now being consolidated (Groove+FolderShare is a large part of the current version of Live Mesh). They're iterating on the same idea and realizing a grander solution, albeit very slowly.

To be fair, most of them don't work very well.

... no! Then instead of 10 committees of 20 people, they'll have 1 godawful app designed by 1 ginormous committee of 200 people!

Reminds me of joelonsoftware's recent Architecture Astronauts post.

A relevant quote:

"The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try. Since 1988 many prominent architecture astronauts have been convinced that the biggest problem to solve is synchronization."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html

Misleading article.

To say sychronizing files from your PDA to your Ford is the same as sharing folders on the web? That's a bit of a stretch.

Could there be some kind of uber- sharing-synchronization program? Beats me. Seems like there are a lot of market segments and problems. Why would we want one, big, bulky product that does a gazillion different types of synchronization?

You see, Microsoft gets it both ways. They write the product that does everything, people bitch about enterprise apps. If they write a dozen niche products that are somewhat similar, people bitch about duplication.

For me? I'm a big Groove fan, even if they did cut the crap out of the features to make it less competitive with their other stuff.