The slow, lingering death is over
WinFS is
no more. This comes as no great surprise to me. The effort to provide a common data storage system for the Microsoft environment was a massive undertaking. It has been a long-held vision for such a long time because of the the significant impact it has for any Microsoft product which needs to manage data. It had also become a personal holy grail for Bill Gates, which does make me wonder if the announcement was timed to follow that of his planned change in role.
The existence of a common data storage system, manifested as a discrete product/capability of the Windows operating system in WinFS, is no longer the primary goal. However, the capabilities of that data platform are materialising in multiple places: Orcas, the next generation of Visual Studio, the .NET Framework with
Entities - a high-level data model for representing customers, products - and
LINQ - a general purpose query language for XML, relational and potentially other data types - SQL Server and so forth. WinFS will no longer be the focus going forward but the notion of the
Data Platform Vision will be.
In terms of the impact, I actually think it is comparatively limited. Interaction with the data storage system is primarily through higher level products - Visual Studio, SQL Server, Data Protection Manager and so forth in a Microsoft world - and the message from Quentin Clark, Director of Program Management for WinFS who
posted the announcement, is that those products will incorporate aspects of what would have been WinFS. The only minor impact - and I think it is minor because WinFS was pulled from Longhorn Server /Vista such a long while ago now - is from a marketing/perception perspective, now that the operating system will lack one of the three pillars that originally underpinned the vision. Microsoft has done a good job with Vista of providing much of the user experience of WinFS, such as search and extensible metadata, without it being baked into the platform.
So, all in all, newsworthy as Microsoft appears to have finally admitted defeat when it comes to the search - no pun intended - for its holy grail but in the larger scheme of things not as significant as the announcement would have been two years ago. I think the same is true for organisations considering the adoption of Longhorn Server/Vista. There are much more significant issues that they should be worrying about, particularly as they spend the vast majority of their time working with technologies that hide the underlying data storage system.
