In case you haven't heard the news,
WinFS is dead. At least, what it should have been is dead; the relational file system users don't know they urgently need. Well, some of them know. My father isn't into computers, but once told me he was fed up with those paths and drive letters, and "My documents" mystery hole and the difficulty he had finding that Excel report he did for that person, of the latest version of his brochures. He exactly told me he needed a relational file system, but not in these words. His wording was something like "What is doing Microsoft to improve this aspect?", and I was happy to answer "WinFS"!
And that's the problem with WinFS: Microsoft can't sell this to users. Or at least, it doesn't know how. The nice-looking UI, the connectivity, the enhanced security, those aspects are "marketable" to the mass public. WinFS wasn't... they thought. However, my father, mother uncle, neighbor, cousin, they all have something in common; they work with files and know little to nothing about file paths, and folders, and drives. They want to save their documents and informations, and they want to get it back easily, and they all stumble on the "where did I save my file?" paradigm. Desktop searching tools do make half their life easier, but until these kinds of feature to not make it to the application layer, files will stay a non-organized pile of bits users can't manage easily.
Microsoft, you have been playing a very dangerous game opening your prototypes to the developers like you did at the PDC in 2003. Your greatest sellers, the developers community, are starting to loose faith in Windows Vista, and the technology it promised. In the future, when you will present us with another ground breaking technology, we'll all have to stay defensive, and wait for true signs of maturity before embracing it. If you keep shooting "wolf" for nothing, one day you won't see any of us come to your rescue.
As
I've said in the past, WinFS was the most important of Longhorn's three pillars. Now Vista only stands on two legs; let's hope it can run fast!