WinFS

Wow, it’s dead. You have to be sad when anything goes south that so many people have worked on so hard for so long. Still, I remember being told in the early Nineties, when I was talking up Unix servers, that I was silly and wrong because the Cairo object filesystem would make everything else irrelevant. And then years later, when I was selling search and content management for a living, being told once again that we’d all be casualties of the WinFS bandwagon. I wonder if, in other professions as in ours, the conventional wisdom is so often so wrong? [Update: Lots of thoughtful coverage: The OS Review, Developing on the Edge, The Fishbowl, Dare Obasanjo, Simon Phipps.]