From what I have been reading, SkyDrive and LiveMesh are going to be tightly integrated into Windows 8. SkyDrive under different names has been around for several years. I have been playing around with the newest iteration of SkyDrive, Office Web Apps, desktop integration for Mac and Windows 7 boxes, and sharing.
There are some gotchas: you can't edit docs using Office Web Apps on an iPad, the Mac client only supports Lion, and the sharing via email addresses on the desktop clients does not seem to work for me. However if they get this better integrated with the release of Windows 8, then they will have a real competitor for Google Drive. Definitely worth checking out if you have Office, Windows, and need to access and edit files across multiple devices. My understanding is that MS may do away with Livemesh, or possibly incorporate it into SkyDrive.
There is a real opportunity here for MS to get this right, if all parties involved are speaking the same language and can come together to create a coherent product.
The real key to being able to present this as a viable alternative to Dropbox or Google Drive is to make all of the parts of SkyDrive work the same, provide a unified visual metaphor and uniform functionality across all platforms. If Office Web Apps worked on Android and iOS, or at least were available via web browser for instance, then the likelihood of the public adopting the platform would be greater. Further integration with the Windows Live Apps, such as Movie Maker would also help create the impression of a single integrated platform, something that Google has been struggling to do as well.
It will be very interesting to see how Windows 8 integrates with SkyDrive, and how the OS drives Skydrive to evolve.
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