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The Sad Tale of WinFS and the Vista User Experience
Monday, June 26th, 2006
WinFS has long been regarded by Microsoft-haters as vaporware. They said it would never see the
light of day. It was just another empty promise to keep users looking forward at future Windows releases and away from alternative platforms like Linux or Apple’s OS X. Yesterday, Microsoft proved them right by dissolving the WinFS project into their various other data access products (SQL Server and ADO.NET). Microsoft’s PR spin paints this as a joyous occasion but in reality they’re just ignoring the core idea of what WinFS was supposed to bring to computing. Sure, in many ways this is a positive action. No longer will there be separate API’s for the WinFS and the Enterprise Server products.
This was one of the biggest complaints Microsoft heard since they began showing WinFS in 2003. It made no sense to have the free Windows data engine have support for unstructured data and hands-free self-management while the expensive SQL Server 200x lacked such features and required different API’s. In fact, one of Microsoft’s primary goals in data storage was to move all data access products to the same codebase and API’s. This change definitely helps them do that whereas the WinFS introduced in 2003 did exactly the opposite. The OS Review
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