“WinFS has had a turbulent history. Originally announced as one of the three ‘pillars’ of Windows Vista—the other two being the new Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code-named ‘Avalon’) user interface layer and the Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code-named ‘Indigo’) web services layer—WinFS was to revolutionize how users and developers interacted with the files on their computers. In late 2004, Microsoft announced that Vista, then code-named Longhorn, would ship without WinFS,” Jeremy Reimer reports for Ars Technica.
“Later it was admitted that WinFS would be delayed even beyond Vista Server, but would be released as a free separate download for both Vista and Windows XP. Beta 1 of WinFS hit MSDN last August, and looked promising. However, Microsoft dropped a hammer on WinFS fans this weekend by revealing that WinFS Beta 2 has been canceled, and the technology behind WinFS is now scheduled to be rolled into the next release of Microsoft’s SQL Server product, rather than a standalone release,” Reimer reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The “three pillars” of Microsoft Albatross, er… Vista. That’s one mangled tripod. Looks like a Tiger got a hold of it; or a Leopard or something. Does anyone actually do anything at Microsoft anymore? Redmond’s robber barons must award extra towels for gross ineptitude; double for pure incompetence. Moo.
Here’s what the drill looks like to us: Microsoft announces something and “boy, it’ll be ‘super!'” Then they slip the ship date, then slip some more, shed a feature or two, then announce some meaningless restructuring plan, then slip some more, then throw some chairs/drop some f-bombs, dump a major underlying technology “pillar,” slip a little more, kill some more features, and then they finally just cancel the vapor altogether. Lather, rinse, repeat. Oh, sorry, they did get Origami out the door…
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LOOOK OUT BELOWWWWW!!!!!!!
GIANT CRUMBLING ALBATROSE AVALANCE!!!
(ehhe, my MDN magic word was “death”)
“I smell a Troll. Phew!”
what for pointing out that Apple’s record on cancelled operating systems and marginally successful products which got partially rolled into other products, and defective products isn’t so great?
What do you want? A forum where everyone forgets history, says how Apple could never make such mistakes, strokes each other’s dick and says how wonderful Apple is?
On processors:
“The switch was the result of a “Perfect Storm” in the processor industry.”
What Intel releases a new series of processors which are incrementally faster then their predecessors and that’s a “perfect Storm” in the industry? Apple’s not getting much from Core that they couldn’t have got from previous Intel processors.
68k and PPC were screwups because both were processors with no future that caused the user base and developers a lot of pain in migrating.
And “Defining” a market isn’t the same as leading it. Otherwise Creative would be the MP3 player king, Xerox would lead in GUIs, Bell Labs in UNIX based operating systems and so on..
“they shoud bring back DOS…fits on a floppy disk too”
Well the beauty of the PC architecture’s consistency is that you CAN still run DOS on your modern PC if you want to.
“Can someone help me with a list of software/OS features that Apple has dropped/extended/changed/made unsubstantial in the past years?”
Apple cancelled three entire operating system projects. Three projects!
Do you want the whole list of original design goals for those operating systems, or is the fact that Apple couldn’t write an operating system to save themselves then eventually went with open source code written by others enough evidence?