The Death of Win:FS

It would be tempting to write off the news of the news of the shelving of Microsoft's much vaunted next generation filing system WinFS, which was first supposed to ship with Vista, then later as a standalone application, as a ho-hum, so what event. However, the way the product was quietly canned without any public explanation has caused some disquiet among market watchers.One or two pundits have raised eyebrows because of the fact that the WinFS news was leaked in an off-handed manner in a developer's blog rather than an offical company announcement, in an apparent effort to bury the news. However, more significant than the PR strategy of using a blog instead of a media release is the growing body of evidence that Microsoft has difficulty in delivering the goods it promises years in advance.

Full Story: http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/4769/53/

A Windows whose file system is a powerful, object-oriented database that can wrangle content of all kinds with aplomb? It's one of the best ideas that Microsoft ever came up with--and maybe the most vaporous. And it died again this week when a posting at a
Microsoft blog said that WinFS won't appear in a beta 2 version...or, actually, at all as the Windows Vista add-on it was most recently going to be. (Instead, aspects of its technologies will get rolled into other Microsoft products like SQL Server and ADO.NET, says the blog.)

Full Story: http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/002323.html