On Friday, Microsoft revealed through a corporate blog that it will not deliver its next-generation storage engine, WinFS, as a separate product as previously planned. Instead, the software giant will ship WinFS technologies as part of other upcoming products, such as the next version of SQL Server, codenamed Katmai.
"We are not pursuing a separate delivery of WinFS, including the previously planned Beta 2 release," Quentin Clark, a member of the WinFS team, wrote in the WinFS Team Blog. "With most of our effort now working towards productizing mature aspects of the WinFS project into SQL and ADO.NET, we do not need to deliver a separate WinFS offering."
According to Clark, WinFS work is ongoing at Microsoft. All that's changing is the packaging: Instead of shipping a WinFS deliverable that users could install on client and server versions of Windows, mature WinFS technologies will be delivered in the near future, while less mature portions will come later.
This isn't the first major change to the WinFS schedule. Originally promised as part of Windows Vista, Microsoft last year delayed the WinFS release until Longhorn Server's 2007 launch, promising that it would be integrated with Windows at a later date. Now, it's unclear when or if that will happen. But Clark suggests that work will continue. "Windows will continue to adopt work as it's ready," he wrote. "We will continue working the innovations, and as things mature they will find their way into the right product experiences--Windows and otherwise."
Thanks to Steven Bink for tipping me off to this story.
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*takes deep breath*
AHAHAHAHAHAAHAA!
So, clearly, not only does Microsoft possess no creative aesthetic whatsoever (as evidenced by their hideously ugly user interfaces and braindead design decisions--hello, Windows key dumping you to desktop in fullscreen mode), but they absolutely lack the engineering talent to get anything done.
It will be hilarious watching the Microsoft fanboys defending this company, like victims of Stockholm Syndrome. This company has been promising you things for seven years now, and they never deliver. They LIED to you. And you will defend it. You will defend their slow, bloated Windows codebase. You will defend the rampant insecurity. You will defend the blatant cloning of superior innovators. You will defend the fact you're getting something that barely matches the feature set of OS X Tiger from April of 2005!
Windows Vista is shaping up to be a disaster in the making, truly on the level of Windows ME. I predict a massive flop for this bloated beast, as do all the analysts. Hardware sales aren't expected to take off when Vista is released, as Microsoft missed the buying cycle. Beta 2 was an underwhelming, buggy mess. And there are rumblings that Vista will miss January of 2007 and be delayed again.
This MUST be why MarkZ left Microsoft recently, which neither he nor Microsoft would comment publicly on. He must have seen the writing on the wall here and realized Microsoft is on its way out, a dying company that has become a worse IBM than IBM.
Seriously, guys, buy a Mac. You can dual-boot to Windows to keep your games and other old necessities, but for the real work you can use an OS that's kept constantly modern and up-to-date. There's just no reason at all anymore to keep buying PCs and be stuck with the dwindling Windows disaster.
bonch June 24, 2006 (Article Rating: