Anyone noticed the striking similarities the Windows Live APIs have to Hailstorm? George Moore, General Manager, Live Platform Services posted an interesting article outlining the unified storage APIs becoming available:

For the first time ever we have a unified protocol and developer tooling story across most of our major storage products from Microsoft:

• On-premises structured storage: SQL Server
• Cloud-based structured services: SQL Server Data Services
• Cloud-based Live storage services: Spaces Photos and Application Data storage

Granted, I haven’t put more than 10 minutes of actual thought into this, but here is what I’m taking away so far:

1. Microsoft is benefiting from Ray Ozzie’s experience with data synchronization (Groove)
2. They realize that people are more willing to do mash-ups than when Hailstorm came out
3. Companies need to own the data, in part or whole, locally for performance, legal, or privacy reasons (or just don’t trust Microsoft to own the only copy of their data)
4. Storage of structured data and application data continues to grow by services such as YouTube, Flickr, and others
5. If they don’t make a play in this space, they will lose another foothold with companies that don’t need them beyond a desktop OS and office productivity software anyway

What do you think?

Update: Joel Spolsky posted his comments on this as well. Well said, Joel!