It was abandoned due to The Cloud. There was no need for WinFS as a tech when you could store everything in The Cloud.
It was also complex, ran poorly, and would have required developers to integrate their applications.
Microsoft had long solved the problem of blobs and metadata in ESE and SharePoint's use of MS SQL for binary + metadata storage.
> it was just a SQL database that stored arbitrary data.
I mean, for some definitions of “just”, “SQL database”, and “arbitrary data.” :) It was a schematised graph database implemented on top of a slimmed-down version of SQL Server. The query language was not SQL-based.
> It was abandoned due to The Cloud.
It was discontinued circa 2007. The cloud was much less of a Thing back then. I don’t recall that factoring at all into the decision to cancel the project, though it would have been prescient.
(Disclaimer: I was on the WinFS team at Microsoft.)
Skydrive released in 2007.
But fair enough, I grabbed my Beta 1 copy from \\products; it was fun to play with. I wish they’d seen it through. Microsoft had plenty of 'slimmed down' versions of SQL Server, i.e. the CRM addin for Outlook, so that isn't quite a unique feature of WinFS.
Did Microsoft tell the WinFS team why they decided to cancel the product? If so, can you reveal what the real reason was?
I mean, it’s not like whenever a project is cancelled at Microsoft they bring team members into a room and say, “We’re totally going to lie to the public (and therefore the shareholders) but here’s the real reason...”
Maybe all the nuances aren't fully communicated publicly when a project is cancelled, but I don’t recall having a sense that what was said publicly was any different than our understanding internally. But that was almost 20 years ago.
The majority of the teams I was on during my time there were ‘internal startups’: Mira, NetGen, WinFS, MatrixDB. Like startups anywhere, projects being unceremoniously cancelled was par for the course.
I don't remember Microsoft ever really giving the public a reason for canceling it. It just seemed to disappear with everyone just speculating what the reason was. Was there a press release that I missed?
I vaguely recall something being posted to the blog. I doubt the blog is still up. I could google around and check the Wayback Machine and so forth, but it would probably be faster if you did it yourself. I don’t have any inside info, I’m afraid.