Post #259,959
6/25/06 8:06:29 AM
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WinFS is Dead
[link|http://www.osreview.com/2006/06/24/the-sad-tale-of-winfs-and-the-vista-user-experience/|The Sad Tale of WinFS and the Vista User Experience]
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 OS X. Yesterday, Microsoft proved them right by dissolving the WinFS project into their various other data access products (SQL Server and ADO.NET).
...
The most shocking part of it all is how quickly they forgot about us. Just 2 weeks ago they were showing off the new WinFS beta 2 bits at TechED. A few weeks before that, they publicized a series of job postings on the WinFS blog while drumming up talk of Project Orange, their \ufffdThe killer app for getting users organized\ufffd. I\ufffdm sure developers might feel somewhat warm about the whole situation but as a user I\ufffdm beyond irritated.
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After all the expectations I had for the Vista wave of technologies and the user experience it would bring I feel I\ufffdve been let down by Microsoft. I don\ufffdt say this as a typical anti-Microsoft zealot but as a true fan of Microsoft products. If Microsoft would have told me in 2003 that they were planning to deliver the product as a cut-down user experience and a bunch of SQL Server 200x add-ons then I would have explored other platforms sooner.
How naive he is. They kept him captive for 3 years with their vaporware. I don't feel sorry for him at all, anyone with half a brain should have realized a long time ago that Microsoft was promising vaporware.
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Post #259,966
6/25/06 11:28:50 AM
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I'm surprised they killed it
WinFS / Object File System has been vaporware since Win95, I'm surprised they would kill such a useful tool now. But I guess they felt that pushing it back again will require a new name and they can wait till after Vista is out to annouce it.
Jay
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Post #259,968
6/25/06 12:10:49 PM
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Supposedly UI problems did it in.
[link|http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/06/winfs-is-dead-hiring-stop-another.html#comments|Mini-Microsoft]: As a former WinFS'er, WinFS's problem wasn't performance - it's problem was in how to expose all the data stored in it in a way the end users (i.e., your grandmother, who probably can't deal with even files and folders and isn't ready to write queries, even natural language ones) could manipulate directly. All the redesigns I saw over the last year were concerning this one issue. Everything else seemed to be coming together except how to expose it to the end user. My perception is once management realized they had all the other problems solved except this one and could ship everything else in SQL Server and benefit a whole bunch of people without waiting for solution no one had found after a huge investment, they decided to merge everything that did work into SQL Server/ADO.Net. And break off the part they were struggling with into a new, much smaller, prototyping team, not called WinFS. So all the parts of WinFS are still alive, just broken up into stuff we know how to do and can ship and stuff we don't know how to do and aren't sure when or if it'll ship.
By Anonymous, at 8:35 PM MS selling it as a product for years was typical of their FUD/Vaporware. Moving the code into SQL server, etc., doesn't sound like an unreasonable move to me, but killing it because a grandmother can't figure it out seems incredibly stupid. What ever happened to the idea of an OS vendor supplying a basic framework and letting ISVs build on it?[1] Cheers, Scott. [1] Yeah, the good old days before Microsoft decided ISVs didn't need to exist.
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Post #260,935
7/6/06 5:40:50 PM
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How butt-stoopud *are* these people?
OK, so you got this new file system, does all kinda new shit, but you can't come up with a new, oh-so-slick metaphor for it? And that kills the entire project?!? The wingnuts there are more stupid than even I thought.
The answer is too fucking simple. You simply take the new slick underlying file system, and place the old, existing, boring, unexciting, no-sizzle-but-lots-of-steak, everybody-knows-how-to-use-it-except-that-guy's-grandmother file interface, and splice it onto the front end. Then, as time goes on and smarter people than Micros~1 apparently they have start fiddling with it, they can later splice on the new, ohhh-so-k3wl interface onto it (and, since this is Micros~1, kill the old interface that the entire installed base knows how to use).
What the fuck, this is an "object" database, ain't it? And wouldn't you assume that an object database would have an object design? You know, implementing interfaces and all that?
But I guess this is another case of Micros~1 marketing weenies driving the technologists (read: form over substance), where we can't have a new and potentially useful feature without throwing out 60-some years of computing history along with it, now, could we? That wouldn't make sense to the Marketeers, and we know which tail is wagging that dog. So because we can't come up with enough splash to "exploit" this new file system, they'll just kill it ("I'm taking may ball and bat and going home!").
I'm not going to miss Bill Gates in the slightest! Good riddance, you moron.
jb4
"So don't pay attention to the approval ratings that say 68% of Americans disapprove of the job this man is doing. I ask you this, does that not also logically mean that 68% approve of the job he's not doing? Think about it. I haven't."
— Stephen Colbert, at the White House Correspondent's Dinner 29Apr06
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Post #260,943
7/6/06 5:56:45 PM
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You're foaming at the mouth.
Peter
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Post #260,021
6/26/06 10:41:19 AM
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Key thing to note from that posting
WinFS has long been regarded by Microsoft-haters as vaporware. He's clearly implying that the people calling it vaporware were only doing so because they were Microsoft haters. "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while," and all that. It doesn't even occur to him that maybe those people saying it was vapor were right, and had good reasons to believe what they said. ===
Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
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Post #260,025
6/26/06 11:51:01 AM
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It was pretty thick vapor for a while
There was a beta 1 with the major features present in some form except for any real UI integration and server side support.
Beta 2 was showing at a conference a few weeks ago and was going to ship there or shortly after, before they decided to wave their hand through it.
--
Chris Altmann
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Post #260,036
6/26/06 2:47:43 PM
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Wasn't that the criticism to begin with?
There was a beta 1 with the major features present in some form except for any real UI integration and server side support. I may be retroactively misremembering what people were saying one or two years ago, but I'm fairly sure the lack of a useful UI was one of the big problems. Just like the guy said in the post at the top of this thread, there's no way Grandma was ever going to learn how to write natural language queries. If you can't figure out how users will do that, you're not solving the problem. So the problem you want to solve is people can't find things efficiently on increasingly-large hard drives. You come up with a solution that involves changing how things are stored and retrieved. Then you don't come up with a usable interface for people to interact with this new file system. Did anyone on that project have the end user's interests in mind? ===
Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
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Post #260,037
6/26/06 3:01:39 PM
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Well, End Users. Yes they did.
IN fact that is where it finally ended up. In MS SQL and ADO.NET
I remember a comic that had Thomas Edison in it. He was improving the phonograph he invented. But on the wall was some fancy "Stereo Equipment of the 90's". A colleague came and asked what that was "over there". Edison's reply was something like, "Oh that's the prototype, but we can't let the incremental upgrade market goto waste."
Blah. I wish I could find it.
-- [link|mailto:greg@gregfolkert.net|greg], [link|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry|REMEMBER ED CURRY!] @ iwetheyFreedom is not FREE. Yeah, but 10s of Trillions of US Dollars? SELECT * FROM scog WHERE ethics > 0;
0 rows returned.
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Post #260,041
6/26/06 3:34:22 PM
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So you think 'file search' was MS's WMDs?
Sounds like you're saying they wanted a reason to write a new file-system that made SQL Server more efficient. But doing that would piss off the rest of the software industry, and would (correctly) be seen as leveraging their OS monopoly to extend an advantage into the database sector, in which they have real competition. So they instead put forth the explanation that they were trying to help people keep track of content on their huge new disks, knowing from the start that there was no way it could ever work for that.
Was that what you were getting at, or did I just make up my own conspiracy theory?
===
Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
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Post #260,151
6/27/06 2:01:32 PM
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Spot on.
I've got to stop giving out to much info... you got it in one shot.
Either that, or you are finally seeing things the way I see them.
Scary either way.
-- [link|mailto:greg@gregfolkert.net|greg], [link|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry|REMEMBER ED CURRY!] @ iwetheyFreedom is not FREE. Yeah, but 10s of Trillions of US Dollars? SELECT * FROM scog WHERE ethics > 0;
0 rows returned.
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