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WinFS' Demise Not a Bang Or a Whimper
Shadowruni writes "The Seattle-PI confirms with Mircosoft what MS bloggers and pundits have been saying all along. WinFS simply isn't going to happen. Some of its features have been 'merged' with other projects." From the article: "WinFS was dropped from Vista in what company executives described at the time as a trade-off to get the operating system completed in a timely manner. The release of Vista has since been delayed again and is now scheduled for November for large customers and January 2007 for the general public, though some observers say it may be out even later." Final confirmation of a story from last month.
So what you want to see is an compilation of immature academic technologies into a mature stable production system. Why not just wish for a gold house?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Meanwhile, other marketing people are looking at the feature set of distributed link tracking.... And another set of marketing weasels are looking at DRM respect... and attributes for near-line storage management... and (name any competitor's advantage, and expect Marketing to want to add it to the feature set).
The failure isn't in Engineering - it's in Management. Someone promised too much complexity.
Given a year or two per feature set, done incrementally, with product releases that allow the code to be tested and refined, WinFS probably could be engineered into a fine solution.
But the deadline is too close now. They need to cut their losses and bug-check what they have, now, so that the file system that does ship is stable, and not a huge disaster.
Interestingly, the open source solution of file systems is far better at trying out new ideas and making progress. It may take longer to make the features integrated - but that integration hasn't been a defining requirement for success or failure.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
Why WinFS failed to deliver...
When the concepts of relational database FS were being thrown around back in the mid 90s, there was a need for this technology. WinFS was to be the next progression of this work, but in its new form a non-structure, non-relational database FS technology.
WinFS was designed to sit on NTFS, never to replace it. In fact none of the proposed MS FS technologies were ever to replace NTFS.
WinFS did develop several inroads in database technology to move past relational and object oriented database storage concepts; however, this was not enough for it to succeed, but rather for its technology to be used in database and data access technologies like MSSQL and the ADO models.
There are two big reasons WinFS was stopped before ever seeing the light of day.
1) Efficiency over functionality
2) Business & Networked File Systems
The first is probably the biggest nail in the coffin, but yet also the hardest one to get through to people.
In current computing environments, adding in a good indexing technology, you can provide 99.9% of the functionality of WinFS and the overhead in doing so turns out to be less than if a full WinFS was implemented.
For example, it is easier and more efficient to have a database indexing backend that references the standard FS and FS contents than it is to put the FS contents into a database. This can be witnessed in products like MS Desktop Search, the Vista Desktop Search, and Apple's Desktop Search as well. (Although the Apple incarnation at this point is a bit more poky than it should be.)
The second part of this is the added functionality. One of the promises of WinFS was the ability to tag and relationally add content to files and file listings. Again, this does not offer 'enough' of an edge compared to the current FS technologies. Most of these features are already supported in NTFS, so you can add tagging, and additional fields of information to the files stored on an NTFS volume, basically providing the same features as adding new fields as a database FS would offer.
The only portion that is somewhat left behind in current technology that WinFS would have provided is the 'relational' nature of items in the FS. But again, the database indexing engine that is used for searching can also provide a certain level of these relational aspects to the file and contents.
So when you look at just these basic issues, you can see why in the end MS pulled WinFS as it exists today, and instead has put the functionality of WinFS in the current technologies, as you find in Vista already. (Fast search, relations between files and file contents, tagging using NTFS, etc.)
It may not be the best PR move for Microsoft in the long run, as people here will have a field day with WinFS being abandoned in its current form as an add-on to NTFS. But if you were Microsoft and could provide 99% of the functionality of WinFS with the database indexing services in Vista (and XP) and do it faster than having to add on a new WinFS layer to NTFS, they why would you progress with a product that isn't going to offer what they can already offer with the current technologies.
If computing power was on par with 1995, then something like WinFS would have more viability as Hard Drives and Processors could more efficiently do all that Vista is doing in a Database structured storage. However today, the overhead of doing this outside a database store is fairly non-existent.
On to the second reason, which is business. Implementing localized database stores for files and documents and keeping these in sync with corporate stores is a rather big hurdle when you consider that businesses are not average Joe users and have tons of applications and infrastructure to coordinate Files spread across networks that are outside of existing MS technologies. WinFS would break many business tools and models rather badly.
As for WinFS and Database FS concepts being 'vaporware' or dead, simply is a myth for the MS haters