Gates Explains Longhorn Delay, Diet 619
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has set late 2006 as the deadline for shipping Longhorn, but to make that date, it had to delay the full implementation of WinFS, an ambitious file system geared at letting users search through all of their files at once. In this interview with Bill Gates, he provides a summary of why Microsoft decided to drop WinFS, saying: "WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things." Meanwhile, MS Watch has published Longhorn head-honcho Jim Allchin's memo on why some Longhorn features had to be axed."
Re:Free Ads / Free Betas (Score:5, Interesting)
If MS did nothing innovative before 2006, it (Microsoft) will have to do the catch-up.
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Microsoft's Copland? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many similarities with Windows and Longhorn - Microsoft also tried for a very long time to hack and upgrade their old OS, also designed for single user with no networking. And yet they were strangled by their own limitations they needed to keep for sake of backwards compatibility. Can they solve it on their own or will they just, say, buy Sun for their OS experience?
Re:Free Ads / Free Betas (Score:3, Interesting)
If they didn't release a product until 2008, the market (mostly linux) would have time to catch-up.
Catch up? Because Linux doesn't [gnu.org] have [tcsh.org] any [zsh.org] command shells...
Seriously, it seems to me that Windows is less and less about operating systems. WinFS was the major new OS feature, and it's been shelved. Looks like we're waiting all these years for adequate security, a new window manager and a bunch of wizards. That's right, and a new command shell. Forgive for not getting too excited.
Re:catch-up? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Pointless (Score:3, Interesting)
Looks like maybe MS should have spent a little more time getting WinFS working instead of tweaking the UI to make it "oh so pretty." Unfortunately, I think MS realizes that a slick (albeit graphics intensive) UI will likely sell more copies to the ignorant masses than an innovation like WinFS.
iTunes-like? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe he should have a look at iTunes and GMail.
For me, a kind of "iTunes for files", including smart queries, would be fairly enough. And it doesn't require a brand new file system and its instability risks...
Re:Avalon's gone too (Score:4, Interesting)
slapped on eyecandy(ala xp).
but really, who didn't see this coming? that's just how they work at ms, if a product is "somewhere on the future" they'll announce all kinda funky crap their r&d crew finds on the net as the next big thing in their future product X.
then the features get axed because they actually have to start to think about getting it out the door!
Reiser4 (Score:4, Interesting)
THANK you (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Is there a word... (Score:3, Interesting)
I just hope to god it doesn't end up like the Nautilus "Spacial browser" - maybe the worst idea of all time
Tiger's Spotlight, anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
*cough* [apple.com]
Microsoft still can't come up with shit until Apple has done it better, first. Sad.
Re:What about Meta-tags? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, the problem they're probably facing is making such potentially complicated queries easy for "grandma." Most programmers I've worked with have trouble creating SQL queries that do exactly what they want it to for complex results, how on earth will grandma find anything?
It'll be really interesting to see how they solve that problem.
Re:Does it matter!? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Via babelfish (Score:4, Interesting)
Why yes, we can. The two key words are "XML patents". Microsoft talking paperclip for their new OS is XML, which is fairly insane to use for a filesystem, but will allow them to solve some of the serious bugs in Word, like the silliness in the "Undo" command.
Reiserfs 4 (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it has.
I was just thinking that it would be cheaper, easier, and faster for Microsoft to just license Reiserfs v4. Just the atomic file writes/updates would be worth the effort! And the filesystem supports plugins.
Some people in the Linux community don't think Reiserfs v4 is stable... but I'm willing to bet by 2006 the issue will be settled.
ReiserFS 4 (Score:1, Interesting)
reiserfs4 is now stable and merged with the mm-patch.
for more information on reiserfs4 go to http://www.namesys.com/ [namesys.com]
download, build and enjoy.
r.
Re:Free Ads / Free Betas (Score:5, Interesting)
I get the impression that for every new version of Windows, they are just having to keep on doing (or perhaps redoing) too much work creating these huge delays and whatnot. They have alot of work to do to fix security AND make Windows usable for MAH and PAH at the same time. I just can't help but get the feeling that the way they are going about creating Windows is part of the problem they have in maintaining it and releasing newer versions of it.
Perhpas I am just interested in seeing Windows evolve rather than just re-inventing itself again and again. Perhaps I'm now thinking of different operating systems.
P.S. I am a Windows user that just happened to install Linux on his old spare PC recently and might have a Apple sitting in the corner ;)
Re:Via babelfish (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm in perfect agreement, MacOSX Tiger won't be coming out until spring next year and they need at least a year to copy it and make pretend all of it's innovations were their ideas. Tiger is going to have the new and innovative graphics environment (the one Micro$loth can't incorporate into Longhorn till they steal the code in Tiger), and it is also rumored to have the new Disk format (again that Micro$loth will claim as their innovation). This is not to mention the Heavy increase of 64-bit code in the OS but still with allowances to make Tiger run on older equipment.
And while I'm at it I might as well throw in that UNLIKE Micro$loth MacOSX has gotten FASTER each new release, even on older hardware. I run it on an iMac 400 my parents gave me back in College and on the Dual 2Gig G5 I bought last September. I use the G5 as my workstation, and the iMac as my home automation and file/iTunes server. I have two Broadband connections routed into my house dumping into my home network with 6Mb max bandwidth. 5 other machines are connected on my Gigabit LAN (only one is a PeeCee). All this for the 6 people that live in my house (me and my Fiancé, and the two couples that live in the two apartments above me).
Hmm, I wonder if the guys at MS now about this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is there a word... (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess the great idea of database of files will turn into another dull "clippy-style" annoying misfeature that pisses users off because of some stupid flaws that shouldn\t be there but are there and are unremovable. Microsoft screwed up too many times in the past to let me believe they will get that right this time.
Sorry.
been done (Score:5, Interesting)
Why don't you check those out to see how much it will do for the interface. What will MS "invent" next?
Re:Is there a word... (Score:2, Interesting)
Whereas Microsoft's task is far greater. They're not delivering a CVS demo, it's a cornerstone of the OS (or rather, was) which means coming up with means to generate metadata, deciding what metadata to store, indexing it and returning it in a manner that's fast and accurate, for every single common format out there.
Microsoft have a fair number of software products and generating metadata is quite difficult (since the user isn't going to supply it himself - how many times have you filled in all the Microsoft Word 'Properties' for your documents?). So it could easily take years.
And don't forget the QA, testing, bugfixing (maybe they'll skip that part
best quote from Gates (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Is there a word... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention the time it will take the user to enter and maintain the metadata.
Re:Is there a word... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Free Ads / Free Betas (Score:3, Interesting)
Gates: Lying or willfully obtuse? (Score:3, Interesting)
"WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things."
Nobody, Mr. Gates? [apple.com] Apple announced this was going to be a key part of OS X Tiger. It is scheduled to be released this coming year, and they have already implemented it in the preview versions of Tiger that they have made available to developers. By all reports it is working just fine, today, right now.
So please, lay off the "nobody" stuff, mmmk?
Re:Free Ads / Free Betas (Score:5, Interesting)
So advertising on a Linux site where you have less customer loyalty is not a bad place to advertise on.
As for the original reply - just because Bill Gates makes a press release does not mean he is trying to get free press. He is the richest man alive, he can buy the press (he actually did). The press wants to hear from Bill Gates, they TRY and hear from him. If this was any other company (almost any) making a press release, you would have been praising them for being forthcoming and letting the public know whats up...so lets not down the man because he is keeping the public informed.
Re:Free Ads / Free Betas (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Free Ads / Free Betas (Score:5, Interesting)
Not necessarily. Microsoft wants enourmous numbers of people to buy Longhorn (or new computers with Longhorn). Most of those people already run Windows. Microsoft needs to convince the people who are already in their camp to upgrade, much more than they need to recruit new users from Mac, Linux, or non-computer-ownership.
This is a tricky game they're playing. Microsoft was telling Win2k users that they should upgrade to an operating system with a database file system, and is now announcing that they aren't going to provide one soon. This might encourage those people to upgrade to an operating system that already has one [sourceforge.net] (sort of).
I'm sure that if more people help out, we can get that driver fully featured by 2006. Then we just need IBM to pay for a series of TV adds: "Linux: the features Longhorn was supposed to have."
Re:Hmm, I wonder if the guys at MS now about this? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's one thing to be able to search for a text string, or even to use metadata to search for audio, images, etc. It's another to be able to detect that a user has pasted a paragraph from a letter she wrote three weeks ago into an email, and link the email semantically to the letter, or track how that text moves and is modified through her correspondence and others in the organization. (Not sure WinFS will be able to do this, just trying to distinguish the scope of WinFS from just searching).
To me, the question is not whether MS can come up with a filesystem can do this, the question is whether anyone wants it. That is, does the market want to do this deep, sophisticated searching, or is it really in just a simple search interface to a good index of existing text, ala Google or this sunrizen business? That's what makes WinFS a big bet, not really the quality of the technology, which will be refined as necessary if people really implement it.
The other thing that makes me a little dubious of the necessity of WinFS is the fact that institutions have yet to really embrace weblogs, which have a similar ability to promote sharing memes but are built on simple technology. This is a "future of collaboration" technology, but so far in the institutional setting it's basically floundering. So either I'm missing some big space where WinFS is really crucial, or it's a bit of a boondoggle. Of course you've gotta bet all that money on something.
Re:Ummm ... AppleTalk? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Free Ads / Free Betas (Score:4, Interesting)
We will not cut corners on product excellence.
Right. That's why SP2 came out on time and with so few problems. Not only was it late, it came with new security problems.
I think Bill is just desperate to keep the press from noticing articles like this [newsforge.com] little tidbit at Newsforge.
As interesting some of the planned features are, they are still dancing around the most important issue: security and timely fixes.
Surely you can't be so naive as to let some FUD like a script utility distract you from the fact the security problems and perpetual scheduling delays!
Re:Free Ads / Free Betas (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux, of course, is very modular. With some notably lame exceptions (I can't recall them exactly now, but they had to do with some graphics library), I'm able to run most anything I want to on my Linux server without installing X, but Windows 2003 will not run properly without Explorer. I could probably get those libraries to work if I did some investigation and re-compiling, but there's pretty much no way I could get Windows 2003 to run right without Explorer. I could change the shell, but I would be missing some critical core functionality.
Windows XP2 SE (Score:3, Interesting)
I really, and I'm not trolling, expect that MS saw what Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger's Spotlight technology was capable of and realised that WinFS was not going to make the huge dent that they first thought it would. I assume that they scrapped the original SQL based technology and started from scratch using Spotlight's abilities as a guide.
That said, I can see the wisdom of getting Longhorn out the door with Avalon. Home users, gamers and newbies are bought and sold on eye candy and Avalon promises to bring loads of that and it is probably extremely important for MS to compete there finally with OSX (which has been around for 3 years now).
Typical Gates (Score:4, Interesting)
So in early 2005 consumers will have a meta data file system, and since Mac OS 10.2 they've had 3d accelerated GUIs... Now if WinFS did get released in longhorn (which it won't be, according to MS.) We'd still be waiting until late 2006, for these features.
I wouldn't place too much emphasis on MS's ability to timeline a product to market. After all windows 95 was meant to have the 3D accelerated GUI, and NT 4 was supposed to have WinFS.
At this rate it'll be 2010 before WinFS sees sunlight.
Re:catch-up? (Score:2, Interesting)
One of the great things about Windows XP (and to a lesser extend 2000) is that you can almost always plug a device in and it works straight away. I have found this really useful with friends' digital cameras. It's the same with portable media players - you just plug the thing in and it's another new drive. Also, I just bought a v cheap 7-in-1 memory card reader, plugged it into a USB port and hey presto, a whole host of new drives appeared. Remember also that these devices will have been released long after XP. So I guess there must be a standard somewhere that Microsoft and the hardware vendors are complying to.
I believe that even the latest Linux distros will not be able to match XP in the way it allows hot plug and play of such devices. I'd quite happily be told otherwise though!
I've got nothing against Linux. I imagine that the Linux developers are concentrating on gaining an even stronger foothold in the server market before getting cute on the desktop. This makes a lot of sense but people need to realise that it's horses for courses. I would avoid Windows as a server platform but I wouldn't want to use anything else on the desktop - at the moment. I think that's called the freedom of choice!
There is nothing new under the sun (Score:2, Interesting)
Lotus Notes [lotus.com] has been available since 1989, but of course that is IBM.
Pause to consider the average user .... (Score:2, Interesting)
When they say "better searching" all I hear is "retrain Grandma" -- if that's even necessary, because they will likely support the legacy way of doing it.
When they say "better security" all I hear is "our previous OS was awful" -- and besides, they will need to patch the older OS.
When they say "better interface" I hear "confusing visuals" and showing Grandma where to click all over again.(Now we'll be able to start a program by clicking on either the start menu, the quick launch, the systems tray OR the new FastBar-Zip-Wham-Clicker!!)
WinFS, whenever and however it is released, seems to be completely untranslatable into average-user speak. Although like everything else I'm sure the MS marketing machine will be able to turn it into bland hype that has consumers vaguely worried about not buying the upgrade.
When I hear the word 'Security,' I reach for my shotgun. Robyn Hitchcock
We have the start (Score:3, Interesting)
It's still in the development stage, but it seems to be moving forward quite nicely.
Re:Like I didn't see this coming! (Score:2, Interesting)
I know, I know, you really loved BeOS and you believe every last drop of hype you were fed in their whitepapers. But Spotlight is not BeFS nor is it Live Queries, both of those are so cumbersome that the BeFS book has a chapter full of benchmarks in which BeFS loses practically every one by a huge margin. If they'd integrated that into Mac OS X it would sink like a brick.
"The Apple Spotlight system instantly and on the fly indexes the metadata. It does so very quickly. The results are instantly available."
Firstly "very quickly" and "instant" are different. Be's solution is instant, but flushes your FS performance down the toilet, so Spotlight didn't duplicate that. Instead it's merely "very quick", which is engineer speak for "it will take an unspecified amount of time, but hopefully you won't notice".
Assuming that you have all the necessary plugins, exactly what you were complaining about with WinFS. No, Apple haven't magically invented a way to discover metadata for files that the OS doesn't understand. So just as with WinFS, sometimes you'll be looking for a file and Spotlight can't find it, and it'll turn out that you need to go get yourself a special Photoshop plugin (for example) or it won't work properly on those files.
Both Microsoft and Apple have snazzy demos which show how wonderful this is, as Be Inc did. Neither of them want to show you the usability studies that prove this is fairly marginal and doesn't really overcome the fact that most people are inherently untidy and will still lose both their car keys and that important PowerPoint file.
[It's the Davis Proposal, but it's called "Smith Proposal2.ppt" and the title field has never been updated either. It says the right thing on Slide 2 of course, but full-text searching of PowerPoint is disabled because it made the PowerBook grind too much, ah well...]
I can explain the delay (Score:3, Interesting)
MSN
Competing with Google for Web searching
MSNBC
Their upcoming iTunes-type store and iPod-wannabe
MS media center
XBox
Trial attempts at subscriber model software
Discontinuation of Explorer
Lackluster updates to XP
Attempst to discontinue older, widely used OSs like NT
Pushing their media players and format into other arenas (CDs, film, etc.)
Now, contrast to Apple, a much smaller company with fewer resources, fewer customers, and look what they've managed to pull off in the last 3-4 years. There is no reasonable excuse for MS dragging their feet with Windows beyond a genuine lack of interest in going much further with the product. I know it sounds crazy, but what other reason could there be? At least, that's what it looks like to me. I think they desperately want to succeed in some other area besides software, want to move away from their core products. In pursuing that, they've let the software end of their business lag badly.
Re:Does it matter!? (Score:2, Interesting)
Problem with them doing this is a lot of coporations use Unix based servers...there is no way that they are gonna just up and switch everything to the new windows based OS because microsoft decided to break compatability....no I suspect that micorsoft will initially make it backwards compatable They will fiercly defend patents they have on winFS so that an open source equivalent doesn't crop up...then they will slowly try to tstrangle the industry into using the new technology.
Of course I really have no clue what they are ultimately up to.
The solution (Score:2, Interesting)
Each application that supports WinFS will act as an API to access their own application's files and deliver the requested content. It will work something like how piping in Linux works, but using XML to define the data as well.
It might be possible to build rich applications out of existing applications. MS are trying to build something comparable to "OSS doesn't reinvent the wheel"
The search portion of WinFS will just work by going through the XML data. You will be able to narrow your searches for specific content, search various content for different things.
Searching by specifying a resized cropped bitmap and finding the original picture is an example, or finding pieces of the picture in other pictures. Searching by specifying audio clips is another possibility. Of course all the other meta data in files already present will also be searchable. (Search for music: by artist, title, length, etc).
Some metadata *can* autopopulate (Score:3, Interesting)
Cameras often encode date and time.
Then, there are remembrance agents like Dashboard [nat.org] that can help, as well.
There are already a lot of relationships embedded in our email and other documents. There's no reason these relationships can't be automatically extracted and formalized by the filesystem for rapid access.
In general, there is a *lot* of metadata that *can* be automatically populated. A lot of it is only of general use. However, that is still a step in the right direction.
Correction, Bill... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, they have. [apple.com]
And this is a FAT/NTFS issue... my 68k Mac from 1992 can find a file faster than a 3.4 GHz P4 with a gig of ram, if it's running Windows. Some filesystems are simply superior to others. The mistake MS made when making NTFS was to not provide it with any sort of indexing, making it impossible to search the directory tree without traversing each node.
HFS/+ has never had this problem. Hit Cmd-F on a System 7.0 box, type a partial filename, and bam... it's there. It's that simple.
That said, WinFS is a really cool idea, since we see hard drives getting bigger than anyone needs them for (read: room for metadata) and systems getting faster and faster (read: easier to parse through metadata). I do, however, wish it was an open implementation. This could be a chance for MS to gain some credibility with the F/OSS world.