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.

Comments

Good news

[also-rr]

At least NTFS is somewhat understood now and drivers (although imperfect) exist and are being improved.

I understand that WinFS was going to have NTFS as the backend but this avoids the necessity to reverse engineer another closed and obfusicated layer of almost-compliant-with-the-spec-which-you-cant-see- anyway rubbish in order to function as well as Microsoft's own offerings.

Re:Where is the latest & greatest in OS develo

[molarmass192]

That OS already exists. There is so much cutting edge work going into Linux that Windows seems archaic in comparison. Yeah, the kernel is monolithic, that's because research over the past 10-15 years shows that microkernels are slooooow. File systems ... pick one, they ALL exist for Linux. HCI ... XGL anyone? Application development ... there are more IDEs and toolkits on Linux than one could learn in a lifetime. Programming languages ... all there. APIs ... broad question ... but anything that's not MS (and even some that are ... WINEAPI) are there. Virutal machines ... Bochs, VMWare, Win4LinPro, etc. Virutalization ... KML and XEN.

You can lock down Linux as tight as you want, use the Oracle IFS db based file system, use Ruby, KDE, VMWare ... I think you get the point. Now, having spewed all that, my impression is that you're waiting to see that "OS" from MS, nobody else, so you have to expect to be waiting a very long time, if ever for it. The fact is, if you want to be on the cutting edge, drop the past and use Linux. If you want to play games ... stay on Windows, it's DESIGNED for people who want something familiar, doesn't obselete any software compiled 15 years ago, and isn't so revolutionary as to scare grandma or the receptionist.

Re:MS not now how to engineer software?

[WindBourne]

Large commercial companies, like MS, do not hire the best coders. Actually, let me rephrase that. They do not retain them. The problem is that MS has ppl at the top that tell the coders what they will do. Many of these are solutions to the marketing problem of how do we retain our monopoly. MS has very little inovative work. That does not mean that they have not hired inovative ppl. But these folks simply move on. What you are left with are several types

1. The engineer who has been there since the 70's/early 80's and are worth millions themselves and now wish to keep accumulating.
2. New engineers who are being worked to death and will go elsewhere for their inovative work.
3. Finally, the grunt who really can not go elsewhere. They are stuck there.

Sadly, it is the final person who is filling the bulk of the positions.

Re:I suspect WinFS failed because it was hard to d

[Tim Browse]

Yay - it's refreshing to see someone working for 'the other side' (for want of a better term) who reacts to this story in a realistic and honest way, without feeling the need to bash MS for their WinFS problems ("Ha ha! M$ are teh suck!", etc).

Perhaps, I don't know, it's because you've spent years working on this problem, and know the difficulties involved, rather than the average slashdot MS basher who read a magazine article about writing file systems once and can't see what's so hard about them, or, come to that, like some of the other posters here, who can't see what's so hard about managing one of the largest software projects on the planet.