Interesting read.
"Over the past couple of weeks, based on what I've said post-PDC, a number of people have said to me, "I just don't get it. What's the big deal about WinFS? Who really cares?"
First of all, until WinFS can leverage, interoperate and bring along it's metadata to the whole web or WebFS or InternetFS it's really not that interesting. Now WebFS or InternetFS on the other hand would be interesting and IMHO should be the goal of where all this is going.
"In a pre-WinFS world, each application has managed its own "documents" and "records" and "collections" as an island unto itself - each with its own indexing and interaction mechanisms, each with its own solution-building mechanisms. Good 'nuf. But in a WinFS world - just like in a Web Services world - we have the opportunity to explore what would happen if we dared to "deconstruct and refactor" our concepts of traditional client-side applications into a mesh of separately-built application components that "meet" at the level of common persistent objects and relationships."
I am not sure that a WinFS world changes the islands model all that much. Yes the island is much bigger but the information is still trapped on the "Win Island". We must stop that kind of thinking and design and architect bigger. Looks like work here for a standards group like the W3C. Like I wrote before, WebFS and InternetFS need to be in the equation from the beginning and preserve the gain made with the new object system on the client.
Example. Lets say I create an audio message on my Win box with all the great rich audio metadata of the day. I publish the message to my Win domain servers and everything works great. Now what if I want to publish the same audio message with all the metadata that I went to the trouble to create out to the public web. What happens? Why should this be any different or anymore difficult? Why can't the design of this new file system leverage the web outside the Win domain of file systems? Remember the web is a melting pot of file systems.
Come on Microsoft you can think outside the box and bigger than this. The world's network (Internet) is not just going to be LongHorn and the WinFS.
"actively participate in leveraging common WinFS schemas, extending them in domain-specific ways, and standardizing additional types. It will be interesting to see whether this activity ultimately comes from the big players (as has the more recent WS work) or from smaller players/disruptors (as has RSS)."
My money is on the smaller players/developers/disruptors to make this activity happen. I think Microsoft also sees it that way and the latest PDC supports that opinion.
