Microsoft kills new Windows file system
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? It's a smart move, especially if they were building WinFS like they did the gap between FAT16/FAT32 and NTFS. Meaning forwards compatibility.
What do you mean my 98 machine can't play well with my XP machine? Yep. I, and countless others, have been there. It's one of the many choke points MS has created for itself in its history. Fortunately for them, they keep making Windows prettier, and the masses become drooling spazzes when they see pretty shiny new stuff. 
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