Windows 7 is coming out in 2009. It is supposed to be amazing, which multi-touch, surfaces, and small parasites that with eat dead skin from your back while you sleep. It sounds great. What won’t it have? WinFS.
WinFS was supposed to me Microsoft’s super fast file system that enabled amazing search on your desktop. When Apple launched Leopard, however, WinFS was still a glimmer in Ballmer’s eye and MS engineers were amazed at Leopard’s speed.
At the June 2004 WWDC, Jobs blew away the MSFT engineers in attendance by demonstrating lightning fast Spotlight searches on Tiger (OSX 10.4). The court-released MSFT emails show how flabbergasted they were, and the imperative of getting the Tiger preview DVDs back to Redmond for reverse engineering. Comments by MSFT’s Jim Allchin and Lenn Pryor were priceless.
Here’s Pryor:
” You will have to take Vic’s disk…I am not giving mine up. ;) Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was f*cking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.”
Here’s Allchin:
“Yes. I know. It is hard to take. I don’t believe we will have search this fast.”
Come on, guys. Let’s do this thing. I’m a die-hard Mactard because day-to-day Windows use became grating rather than easier. Win me back.