Don’t Call it Shorthorn!
A number of years ago, when I first met Seth Russell and William Loughborough, Seth talked about his visions of a personal semantic store. Although WinFS is not based on RDF quads, it is a contextual triple-based store. I felt that WinFS was a big step forward and could help bootstrap many ?semantic web? applications. I’ve been looking forward to the day when I could finally tell Seth, ?we shipped a V1 of your personal semantic store?.
Unfortunately, during our lunch last Friday, Microsoft released the news that WinFS would not be shipping as part of Longhorn. I still think WinFS is one of the coolest things that Microsoft has done in a long time, and I hope it will eventually make it into developer hands, but I am disappointed that it won’t be anytime soon. I think that WinFS can spark a huge rennaisance in the ISV community.
On the other hand, things like this tend to make the investors happy, to the contrary of what many people might think.Decisions like thismean that the product can ship more predictably and start drawing revenues, and most large customers are conservative about adopting major bleeding edge innovations anyway.
~
Joyce Park (TroutGirl) was canned from Friendster?for blogging?. Apparently forproviding fodderto the JSP vs. PHP holy wars. Now, if she had slammed on Sun or Oracle, I could imagine some powerful sales execs escalating to her management. But in this case, it was just one open-source product vs. another. It’s not as if she was overtly critical of JSP, and I think most people realize that architecture has more to do with scalability than technology, so I really doubt that her blog caused any damage to JSP ?sales?. On the other hand, none of her other blog posts seemed controversial either, so it’s puzzling. Maybe I better shut down my blog.