What is the point of releasing Vista without including WinFS (other than as a lame duck marketing strategy) if that was to be the main feature of the new software? My guess is that there are persisiting major issues with WinFS (which is why the technologies were split to begin with 2 years ago) that cannot be resolved in the near future. To save face Microsoft does not want to further delay Vista's release. Hope this doesn't turn out like the Windows ME fiasco.
If they can't deliver a new user interface that looks at least 80% as OS/X (and some of the newer Linux interfaces), they will start losing market share. Perception is reality.
Honestly, they should take this opportunity to rebuild Vista as an entirely new next generation OS from the ground up, including WinFS and dropping support for anything they have to drop. Microsoft has great computer scientists on staff - they could produce the best OS in the world if they would ditch the legacy code and start with a clean slate.
Indeed. Everything they were claiming was going to ship with Vista has been dropped except the eye candy. What is the point?
The only reason vista will sell is because the market has been warped by Microsoft's monopoly position.
There will be plenty of fanboys out there in the pc-computing press that will still say this is the best thing since sliced bread, as it will push hardware sales due to the incredible requirements this eye-candy costs when Microsoft does it. Hardware and software vendors buy adspace in magazines and elsewhere. This is the driver. Computers are plenty powerful these days for just about any purpose. You need (bloated) software to slow it down to the point that people will upgrade just so their system won't seem like so much of a dog.