Comments on: WinFS, We Hardly Knew Ye: The Q&A

By: stephen o'grady

stephen o'grady — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 14:32:33 +0000

James: i guess we’ll see. i’m not sure i buy that, personally. it’s not as if the UI on top of the current filesystem is all that stellar.

Jaime: well, i can’t claim that i’m the first but i agree with you that it’s an important point. i’m not sure, however, that this is a purely marketing led initiative: i do believe that many of the engineers were in fact hugely excited about the prospect of blending relational technologies into the filesystem. i think, however, that they - like their Cairo predecessors - underestimated the overall complexity.

Mike: i think that’s about right. i call it the “Big Dig” problem, wherein the designers try to solve too many big problems at once, and get hopelessly bogged down.

By: Mike Dolan

Mike Dolan — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 13:29:53 +0000

I have a feeling Microsoft ran into the monolithic code problem with WinFS - change 1 line somewhere at the bottom and you have to change code all the way up… would have been cool to see it in action. I’m sure they’ve learned some lessons in round 1 and Vista’s/Longhorn successor will probably have it baked in from the start.

By: Jaime Cardoso

Jaime Cardoso — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 10:43:01 +0000

Stephen, congratulations in being the first one I see mentioning that the concept of using a relational Database for a File System isn’t something new.
I’ve been arguing this since the begining, WinFS was a bad idea, EMC, Oracle, IBM and others tried it but, they all got to the same conclusion, launching a Database before launching the Operating System is a bad idea and, anyone who thinks that fsck / defrag / chkfsk a file system is bad, I was waiting to see my father trying to reconstruct a Database so his O.S. launches :))
Not to mention that Vista / Longhorn is already a resource hogger, 512MB of RAM just for the Operating System? I can only wonder what level of resources such a system would need.
I believe that MS got caught in an internal fight where Marketing wanted that feature and Engineering couldn’t kill it as a bad (awfull) idea but, most of the industry already tried this and failed, MS was simply another one (fashionable late but, the same old story)

By: James

James — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 05:28:53 +0000

The most interesting opinion I read on MiniMicrosoft was that WinFS worked, they just couldn’t put a decent UI on it. So they split the project in two, and will ship the tech with SQL server or whatever, and continue working on the user interface in Project Orange.

By: stephen o'grady

stephen o'grady — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 03:55:18 +0000

Chris: for sheer enthusiasm, nothing tops Ben Rockwood
Christopher: i remember. i don’t fully agree, obviously, particularly on the idea that MS can’t force relevance, but i take your point.

i think the problem isn’t that WinFS didn’t have a marketable advantage, but rather it didn’t have one that could be easily identified and digested. that’s why i say that what i was excited about wasn’t really the application possibilities such as better desktop search, but where developers would take it.

i think of application development and the relational model it’s relied on for so long, and then extend that to every asset sitting on a filesystem. that, in my mind, could be interesting.

on the rental point, we’ve disagreed on this before and i don’t think we’ll see eye to eye. i don’t believe that they’re a bad deal, and certainly can’t fault customers such as yourself that find them economical; i simply don’t trust the music industry to keep them so.

i don’t want to find myself 5 years down the road, having thrust an amount of money comparable to what i would actually want to buy and listen to down the pockets of a rental service, but own nothing whatsoever.

but that’s just me.

By: baus

baus — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 01:55:26 +0000

I once said:

“”
Microsoft can’t force relevance into the desktop. This is also why WinFS on the desktop is a waste of time. Consumers don’t want to manage their contact database schemas on the desktop. They want google to do it for them. And businesses are already using centrally managed LDAP servers. WinFS has no marketable advantage.
“”

I welcome more robust file systems like ZFS, but the cornerstone of WinFS was its relational features.

I never understood the reasoning behind locking up data in client schemas. It seemed like a maneuver straight out of 1996, and was one of the technologies that made me think that Microsoft was losing it.

BTW, I firmly believe that content “rental” is going to be the favored distribution mechanism in the future. Media “ownership” provides too small of a slice of the available universe. Plus, I do my share of administration, and trust me, home users shouldn’t want anything to do with it.

Eventually Apple will capitulate and provide their own rental service. There is too much money in it.

By: Chris Rijk

Chris Rijk — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 19:59:27 +0000

For what it’s worth, Solaris 10 6/06 (aka Solaris 10 update 2) was released today, and the main new feature is ZFS. Here’s a little summary / bit of reaction:
http://cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=680