Comments on: WinFS, Was it Really so Good? http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/02/winfs-was-it-really-so-good/ A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Wed, 25 Nov 2009 02:29:28 -0600 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 hourly 1 By: Daniel Kornev http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/02/winfs-was-it-really-so-good/#comment-469547 Daniel Kornev Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:18:01 +0000 http://www.ghacks.net/2008/09/02/winfs-was-it-really-so-good/#comment-469547 Hello let me say that WinFS was about relationships and complex metadata model. The metadatamodel from what I can say was not super cool because it tried to have one big model describing all the world where each item in the world would be represented with virtual item in WinFS. The point is that in WinFS it was planned to store items completely in a structured manner. That leaded to concrete schemas for items and the problem team got was that different applications needed different schemas for same items - say "Message" schema can be completely different from Hotmail point of view and Outlook, Exchange point of view and say Outlook Express. But the benefit of WinFS was in... Shell, the whole Microsoft Max was about that, the new shell that enabled user to navigate through relationships between different items - say navigate in social networks cached to local WinFS and so on. Of course in Microsoft Max, the project didn't lead to this functionality as it was abondoned before these changes, but the vision was really cool. This can't be done using today's day Windows Search & Windows Explorer functionality, sorry to deliver such news. And that is the thing I believe (IMHO) that would bring Windows OS to Internet in a way MUCH faster than the whole Windows Live Suite. IMHO of course. Hello let me say that WinFS was about relationships and complex metadata model. The metadatamodel from what I can say was not super cool because it tried to have one big model describing all the world where each item in the world would be represented with virtual item in WinFS. The point is that in WinFS it was planned to store items completely in a structured manner. That leaded to concrete schemas for items and the problem team got was that different applications needed different schemas for same items – say “Message” schema can be completely different from Hotmail point of view and Outlook, Exchange point of view and say Outlook Express.

But the benefit of WinFS was in… Shell, the whole Microsoft Max was about that, the new shell that enabled user to navigate through relationships between different items – say navigate in social networks cached to local WinFS and so on. Of course in Microsoft Max, the project didn’t lead to this functionality as it was abondoned before these changes, but the vision was really cool.

This can’t be done using today’s day Windows Search & Windows Explorer functionality, sorry to deliver such news.

And that is the thing I believe (IMHO) that would bring Windows OS to Internet in a way MUCH faster than the whole Windows Live Suite. IMHO of course.

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