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Microsoft Uncertain About WinFS for XP
Ant writes "As a follow-up to WinFS to be available in WinXP story from a few days ago, BetaNews reports that Microsoft (MS) stopped short of confirming reports that it plans to back-port its next-generation WinFS file system architecture to Windows XP. MS tells BetaNews it is only evaluating the move while also acknowledging WinFS is still years off. "We are currently evaluating making the WinFS storage subsystem available on this platform and will make the decision based on what is best for customers." a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews."
The term 'vaporware' comes to mind...
-- kortex "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"
Its in consumer's best interests to force them to upgrade lest they be left behind and forgotten.
Douglas P. Price
By saying that they're not sure, they are safely leaving the escape route unblocked, in case they fall behind schedule again or whatnot.
Microsoft has been working on this for ten years. It is never going to happen. This was supposed to have been in 'Cairo' and has been a listed feature in every development OS since then. It is never going to release.
.technomancer
If I was in microsoft, I would think that backporting a filesystem wrapper over NTFS is probably a bad idea.
It's hard enough to design this WinFS, much less change all the OS components to be compatible with this filesystem. I also think the learning curve/'WTF is this' factor is too great to drop onto Windows XP users. Let it ride on Longhorn, but make sure you give a really full explanation on how to use this meta-data FS well.
I certainly don't find a need for a DB-based FS, but I know that it helps. Will it help enough people enough to make it worth implementing?
That article contains a wonderful example of the difference between Microsoft and the OSS movement. Microsoft is developing a new filesystem that (one would hope) is vastly more advanced than the one they currently use. Yet they're hedging about making it available for older systems, because they have yet to decide what is "best for customers".
Now, if they were really interested in what's best for customers, you'd think they'd let the customer decide on a case-by-case basis. They could just release the filesystem for older systems via an extensive patch and see what the customers decide to do. Instead, Microsoft is going to determine what is best for all their customers.
The OSS folks would just release (and have released) new filesystems and let the bits fall where they may.
Central planning versus individual choices. Remind you of any 20th-century struggles?
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Isn't Longhorn (with WinFS) supposed to ship next year or so? With WinFS still years off, does it means that Longhorn (and WinFS) is still in vaporware status?
If Microsoft back-ports WinFS to 64-bit XP, it could hurt or help them. In one way, it could get more people to go for 64-bit systems. Those same people could make an easy transition to Longhorn because they would already have 64-bit systems.
But in another way, if they go to XP64, they might not have as much of an incentive to go to Longhorn. There would already be one 64-bit OS with WinFS. People might feel that Longhorn is unnecessary.
I suppose that there is the usual chaos at Microsoft in the marketing department where a makreting person says something that is meant as the usual Microsoft vapourware in order to gather customer interest but where it is so obviously out of sync with actual developments that someone else has to clarify things a few days later.
.Net by default, Avalon, Indigo, WinFS) to be used by a critical mass of developers and users or else it could very possibly fail as badly as MS Passport did.
I presume that marketing also realised that too much talk about Longhorn features being backported to XP could significantly harm sales of Longhorn when it eventually does come out as people will obviously then simply use those features in XP instead of upgrading, thereby making the usual Windows version chaos (some 15% of all Windows users are still using Win98) even worse and pulling down MS' revenues.
On the other hand, MS knows that it needs to have some way to get the new stuff (XAML,
Damned if they do and damned if they don't. Strangely, I feel no pity with them whatsoever, as it was their own predatory monopoly practices, where they would kill their foes with beneath the belt tactics in order to get that very last 3% of users that they didn't already have, i.e. they were never prepared to sacrifice anything in order to have a cleaner and more unified user base.
I don't see the situations as comparable at all -- In the "Copeland" case, Apple desperately needed an new OS and faced huge technical challenges in getting there.
.NET. This is somewhat similar to Steve Jobs' NeXTStep project -- It's designed to make the whole thing more programmer-friendly, but may not provide any direct benefit to end users until years later.
Microsoft really doesn't need Longhorn at all, the core OS is in decent shape, the monopoly is chugging along, and they call add incremental features as downloads or service packs. Yeah, the next version of OS X will have more flash, but nobody has ever bought Windows because it's flashy. (Whereas Apple needs that consumer upgrade revenue.)
Avalon is already in Beta for XP and they've pretty much admitted that nobody was working on IE for the last few years.
The big news about really isn't WinFS or Avalon. It's the rewrite of the core APIs to support
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Based on what is best for customers, my butt.
They will make the decision based on what's best for Microsoft. I don't think the customer has mattered to Microsoft much since about Windows 95. In fact, 10 years later, I'd argue that customer welfare is near the bottom of their priority list.
Offhand, I can't think of a single move they've made in the last 10 years that really and truly had customers in mind. Being in a monopoly position, their mindset has shifted away from 'what services can we offer in exchange for money' to 'how many feathers can we pluck from the goose with the minimum amount of squawking'.
They've always been nasty, hardball competitors, but at one time they shipped some pretty kickass software, too. Word for Windows was particularly good. Even that horrible flop, Bob, was at least well-intended. But now that they are in a position of real power... if you'll notice, they never, ever ship anything that's really disruptive of or threatening to their main monopoly.
Most likely, their internal studies will be focused around how much money they can make and how much customer lock-in they can manage. Will giving it away free give them enough power to be worth losing the cash from selling it? Should they sell it at a low price, to generate some cash but get it into fairly widespread circulation? Should they sell it at a high price to corporations, to gather lots of cash but gain little leverage over filesystem standards? Should they bundle it only into Longhorn to help 'encourage' upgrades? You can rest assured, thoughts like "Is this technology something that every Microsoft customer should be able to use?" will never even occur to them.
Whatever their actual thought process ends up being, actual customer welfare will not enter into it.