Microsoft tries to give WinFS quiet funeral

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 27 June 2006 15:00

IT Industry - Strategy

It would be tempting to write off the news of the news of the shelving of Microsoft's much vaunted next generation filing system WinFS, which was first supposed to ship with Vista, then later as a standalone application, as a ho-hum, so what event. However, the way the product was quietly canned without any public explanation has caused some disquiet among market watchers.

One or two pundits have raised eyebrows because of the fact that the WinFS news was leaked in an off-handed manner in a developer's blog rather than an offical company announcement, in an apparent effort to bury the news. However, more significant than the PR strategy of using a blog instead of a media release is the growing body of evidence that Microsoft has difficulty in delivering the goods it promises years in advance.

{mosgoogle left} WinFS, the object-oriented database file system, that was promised three years ago, is yet another Microsoft project that failed to live up to its promise. Vista is late, Microsoft is behind the curve in virtualization, the new version of Internet Explorer has been a long time coming, Google and Yahoo are widening the gap in the search space, and web services challengers to Windows desktop applications are starting to appear.

It is in this climate, that chairman Bill Gates announced his decision to step away from playing an active role in the company he founded. A few days after that announcement, CEO Steve Ballmer wunderkind Martin Taylor, the vice president of marketing for Windows Live, was shown the door - or so it is believed.

Many believe that the shelving of WinFS and the departure of Taylor are examples of the growing influence of chief software architect Ray Ozzie at Microsoft. This would make sense. Microsoft still makes money from just three key businesses - Windows, Office and databases. In order to grow new markets, Microsoft needs to focus its not unlimited development resources in areas with the greatest growth potential. The internet continues to grow in importance as an applications delivery medium, while the desktop continues to stagnate. Based on this premise, a decision by Ozzie to shut down a failed project from the previous administration makes sense.