Free Republic

Microsoft has cancelled one of the most anticipated features in its next Windows operating system, code-named Vista, which is slated for release next year. Microsoft previously planned to ship the WinFS file system shortly after Windows Vista. In a weblog entry on Friday, however, Quentin Clark -- an executive of the project -- wrote that WinFS would not ship separately, and that some of the feature will be included in a later product. Investors considered WinFS the crucial feature that would encourage upgrades to Vista when Microsoft separated the technologies in 2004 in order to complete Vista by 2006, according...

Excerpt - REDMOND, Wash. -- Jim Allchin, a senior Microsoft Corp. executive, walked into Bill Gates's office here one day in July last year to deliver a bombshell about the next generation of Microsoft Windows. "It's not going to work," Mr. Allchin says he told the Microsoft chairman. The new version, code-named Longhorn, was so complex its writers would never be able to make it run properly. The news got even worse: Longhorn was irredeemable because Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Throughout its history, Microsoft had let thousands of programmers each produce their...