Live Mesh Beta Brushoff - Microsoft shoots itself in the foot, again.

Microsoft reinforced renewed doubt about the safety of data in cloud-based services, while squandering the opportunity to promote themselves as a competent cloud service provider.  When following a site or service from the beginning, we enjoy a veteran status, good username, or some form of loyalty reward.  I just participated in the beta of Microsoft's Live Mesh for over a year.  You would think that when they offer the next iteration of the service, they would send an e-mail about the new features.  Instead they sent this e-mail:

"Dear Live Mesh beta participant,

You're receiving this message because you used the Live Mesh beta from Microsoft. On March 31, 2011, the beta of Live Mesh will end, and the Live Mesh beta will stop working. After March 31, you won't be able to access any files stored online in your Live Desktop or connect to your PCs remotely using the Live Mesh software. Microsoft will not be able to help you retrieve any files you have stored online after this date. Your files will also stop syncing between your computers and your Live Mesh online storage. Please read below for actions we recommend you take.

With the new release of Windows Live services, we've made a series of changes and improvements across the products. We realize they will have an impact on you and we want to make that as easy as possible for you. We thank you for your continued support of Windows Live services.

Why is this happening?

To deliver a better product for all our customers, we combined several services into a new product called Windows Live Mesh. Windows Live Mesh has several performance and reliability improvements compared to the Live Mesh beta, and with Windows Live Mesh, you can also sync your program settings for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office. Learn more.

What you need to do before Live Mesh beta shuts down

To prevent loss of any of your files, please sync all files from your Live Desktop so that you have them on your computer when the Live Mesh beta service is shutdown. To do this, follow these steps:

1.       On your Live Desktop, right-click any Live Mesh folders not yet synced with your computer, and then click Sync with this computer. Make sure all the folders on your Live Desktop have desktop shortcuts.

2.       Select where you want each folder to sync, and then click OK. If a folder has a lot of files, this might take a while. Open each folder and make sure all the files are downloaded.

What you can do moving forward

If you enjoyed the functionality of Live Mesh, we encourage you to install the new Windows Live Mesh. You will first need to uninstall the Live Mesh beta, and then go to http://explore.live.com/windows-live-mesh to get the latest version of Windows Live Mesh. Before you do this, note the folders that you're syncing on each computer and if they're shared with anyone. After you download Windows Live Mesh, you can set up these folders to sync again. Learn more about how to upgrade

Thank you for participating in the Live Mesh beta. We hope you choose to move to Windows Live Mesh.

Sincerely,

The Windows Live team"

Really?  How bout this - "Thanks for assisting in our beta - welcome to the release!".  Instead, Redmond serves up "let's put a barrier between a community of veteran users and the relaunch", along with a side of "by the way, in one month, we're going to delete your data (or at least remove your access to it).  Epic Marketing, Brand and Service Fail.  Live Mesh is actually great - but obvisously Microsoft will find a way to kill it.  Microsoft is asking us to follow them "to the Cloud!".  Ending a service and endangering people's data is no way to promote Cloud Computing or clients' trust of storing data on hosted web servers beyond our control.

Wow, one day with a Mac and I am already bashing Microsoft.