I've often wondered if there's a point at which something like WinFS would become practical simply through the perpetual advance of hardware. MS started working on the concept back in the early '90s (as part of Cairo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)), and eventually gave up on it in 2006, which was nearly 15 years ago now. Devices today have significantly more memory and compute power on tap than they did in 2006, and if you roll the comparison all the way back to 1991 we're on a completely different planet today. And there are entirely new types of hardware that could be leveraged now too, such GPUs, solid-state disks, etc.
I have no idea if MS ever published their performance data, but if they did, it'd be interesting to use it to figure out what a theoretical machine that could run WinFS, as it was when MS gave up on it, fast enough to be useable would look like, and how close to that theoretical machine the machines of today are.
I guess when the next Windows would include a novel FS, people would not care. After decades of experimenting (does anybody remember the fears of users when it was introduced that Longhorn deprecates the traditional filesystem for query-based dynamic folders and thelike... In the end it remained only as another "addition", not a replacement), people expect a desktop filesystem to do what it always did.
Even more, the way how Android and iOS hides away the filesystem from the user in everyday tasks shows that for end users, the technical fundament isn't in the focus anymore. Modern filesystems is something which will change how servers ("backends") work but not how customers do.
That's why I think MS burrows WinFS and will probably never dig it out again...
I doubt MS "burrows" (I think you mean "buried") WinFS. There were likely many good lessons learned from that project about file systems, and there were a few useful outcomes that are present in the current NTFS.
You don't know, what you don't know until you try stuff. It's called research.
I know why they did it but to me hiding the filesystem is one of the most annoying and cumbersome parts of mobile operating systems. It's a shame to have such a lack of freedom with data.
I’m sure Google Drive and iCloud Drive are pretty close. Database based metadata stores with object storage and a view that looks like a traditional hierarchical file system.
OneDrive probably is too, but I don’t understand the relationship to sharepoint.
I've often wondered if there's a point at which something like WinFS would become practical simply through the perpetual advance of hardware. MS started working on the concept back in the early '90s (as part of Cairo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)), and eventually gave up on it in 2006, which was nearly 15 years ago now. Devices today have significantly more memory and compute power on tap than they did in 2006, and if you roll the comparison all the way back to 1991 we're on a completely different planet today. And there are entirely new types of hardware that could be leveraged now too, such GPUs, solid-state disks, etc.
I have no idea if MS ever published their performance data, but if they did, it'd be interesting to use it to figure out what a theoretical machine that could run WinFS, as it was when MS gave up on it, fast enough to be useable would look like, and how close to that theoretical machine the machines of today are.