Microsoft is famed for its strategy of burying competitors' products with "fear, uncertainty, and doubt," or FUD. But lately, it seems to be applying the FUD most liberally to its own offerings.

Take the fate of WinFS, a new, database-driven file system that was once supposed to be a key feature of Windows Vista -- and forever change how we do computing, according to Microsoft. Now, in a curiously oblique blog post, Microsoft's Quentin Clark announced that a planned beta release of WinFS wouldn't be forthcoming, and that components of WinFS would instead find their way into Microsoft's SQL Server database software and other less widely used products.

What does that mean? Programmer Charles Miller quickly decoded the post's "marketing-speak": "WinFS is dead." Since the database file system was one of Bill Gates's pet projects, bloggers like Robert Scoble were quick to point out that WinFS's disappearance as a standalone product had "interesting timing." Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo says that killing WinFS was the right thing to do, but that the decision came two years too late: "It's sad to think about the projects that got killed or disrupted because of WinFS only for this to happen." Sure sounds like there's a lot of fear, uncertainy, and doubt inside Microsoft these days.

What do you make of Microsoft's WinFS maneuvering?