Microsoft: We Killed WinFS Because It Wasn't Ready For End UsersMicrosoft: We Killed WinFS Because It Wasn't Ready For End Users

"SQL Server's role in WinFS is far from dead. Microsoft is just changing how they go to market with it," said Douglas McDowell, director of business intelligence at Solid Quality Learning, a Microsoft partner in Atlanta. "There's tons of great innovation coming in this arena."

Peter O'Kelly, research director at Burton Group, said Microsoft has made adjustments to accommodate key market shifts since plans for WinFS were touted heavily at the software vendor's Professional Developers Conference in 2003. The rise of Google's search engine and Microsoft's acquisition of Groove Networks, for example, have rightfully impacted the WinFS plan, he said.

Microsoft's Search and Organize feature in Vista, LINQ integration layer for Visual Studio's ADO.NET 3.0, Windows Workflow Foundation in WinFX, "Katmai" SQL Server and Groove's offline, peer-to-peer file system each encompass a piece of WinFS functionality or deliver on the promise of the WinFS vision, according to O'Kelly.

"To be fair, there's a tactical mistake, but strategically they're on track. It's the death of WinFS but the resurrection of a lot of ideas in a lot of places, and Microsoft will get to market through other means than through a monolithic chunk of code," O'Kelly said. "It's called WinFS, but there's always been a sense that WinFS was a compelling vision with a big question about how it would go to market."

Microsoft's Clark said he has no regrets about changing the blueprint but acknowledged that the marketing of WinFS has been less than ideal.

"The original goals of WinFS have never changed, but the technology we are building isn't easy. So we did take a number of internal design changes and rewrites," he said. And I am not going to apologize for that. Getting the relational engine to behave and perform like the Windows file system isn't a matter of a few lines of code. It has to be done very carefully and architected right," Clark wrote in his blog Monday.

Then why did Microsoft promise WinFS Beta 2 at Tech Ed 2006?

"When we were at TechEd, we had not made the decision. Sure, it was under discussion, but we did not have all the information we needed. And we had not made the call yet," Clark explained. "We did share the news as soon as we had the final word. We could have waited longer to disclose the information and made the change in plans less of a contrast, but we chose to notify people as soon as we could. This is why we used the blog and didn't fire up the big MS PR machinery. That takes time."

Others say the resurrection of WinFS also comes in the form of Project Orange, a group within Microsoft whose mission is to develop a next-generation Information Explorer based on WinFS and WPF.