Back when Windows Vista was still known as Windows Longhorn, the operating system contained a very interesting and promising feature, a feature promoted as one of the 'pillars' of Longhorn: WinFS. WinFS was a storage subsystem for Windows, based on a relational database, that could contain whatever data you wanted to put in it. Thanks to the relational properties of the database, you could then create relationships between data, or let the computer do that for you.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-06-29
Please, people, read the article PROPERLY before spouting NONSENSE. ZFS, Beagle, Spotlight - they're all awesome, but have absolutely NOTHING to do with the technologies behind WinFS or the original WinFS project that led to their creation.
ZFS is an advanced filesystem that allows for things like volume snapshots and copy-on-write. Indexers and query tools like Beagle and Spotlight index the data on your hard drive, and expose that index to the user through what is in essence a glorified search dialog. All these technologies do their job well, they're useful, and I wouldn't want to live without Spotlight on my Mac.
WinFS has little to do with searching and indexing, and more to do with managing. WinFS allowed you to set relations between objects, and use those relations to manage and organise your data - either manually, or automatically via applications. To achieve this goal, it used a relational database, as described rather well in the interview.
Please, people, I know it's fashionable to discredit anything Microsoft does, but the ideas behind WinFS were sound, and the goals ambitious. They failed a lot of times to bring these concepts to your doorstep, but it seems, judging by the words of Clark, that they heave learned from these errors and are now working at in a different way: ensure a solid base, and build up the house from there.
In the interview, you can clearly read that the idea of bringing WinFS' features to the desktop are not quite dead just yet. And you can be anti-Microsoft all you want, but I'm excited about that.
Member since:2005-07-06
Please, people, read the article PROPERLY before spouting NONSENSE. ZFS, Beagle, Spotlight - they're all awesome, but have absolutely NOTHING to do with the technologies behind WinFS or the original WinFS project that led to their creation.
That's true. If you want a semantic desktop in the *nix world, have a look at nepomuk http://nepomuk.kde.org/
As KDE4 will be ported to Windows, MacOS, there is a chance that we will see the the ideas of the original
WinFS come true, regardless what Microsoft decides to do with WinFS in the future.
Member since:2007-07-31
I think people are just getting fedup with Microsoft announcing products and features that never come to fruition.
Microsoft constantly goes competition bowling with press releases.
Iphone - surface, is the most recent example I can think of... Microsoft seems to feel that if you don't have your own thunder then try and steal everyone elses AND/OR announce a non existent product before a real existing launch to stupefy your competitions customers. Years later while they wait to buy Microsofts previous announcement MS can sell them something with half the promised features when the competition had already a fully implementable solution -- sometimes driving the competition out of business in the process!
I have all the respect in the world for the WinFS team and the dream that could have been but the PR fiasco that was Vista was happily hyped and fueled by MS before the release and now they wonder why people are pissed when it's all Scots mist?
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/11/07/windows-longhorn-concept-vi...
That previous video of longhorn showing the leopard like smooth transitions and accelerated graphics actually made what would become Vista an interesting OS and yet all we end up getting is an encumbered XP with a pretty skirt?
Once Microsoft actually starts delivering on their promises THEN maybe they'll regain some respect from the tech community.
It's funny, people say Steve Jobs has a personal reality distortion field generator -- and its bloody true!
But in all honesty, I think it's standard equipment for everybody working in Microsofts public relations department!
Member since:2005-11-10
Please see video that I linked, the one showing WinFS team demoing and talking about WinFS beta 1.
"Not equuiped to organize and develop.." ??? Really? How did they manage to get it to beta 1 then?
The decision to stop working on it (for now) had nothing to do with teams' (in)ability to deliver.
Edited 2008-05-18 16:34 UTC
Member since:
2005-07-06
Look one article down to
"Interview: Kevin Musick, BeServed; Haiku Code Drive 2008
Written by Thom Holwerda on Sat 17th May 2008 19:19 PST"
Microsoft should drop their ambitions to code that they are not equipped to organize and develop and turn to people who can. Or go with ZFS.