joeware - never stop exploring... :)

Scoble has an interesting, but IMO, completely offbase opinion on why WinFS is dead. At least I hope it is off base, if it isn’t Microsoft is even more far off in their thinking than I ever thought and I need to start spending even more time on FreeBSD.

Robert seems to think that the web killed it. He is of the opinion that everyone is going to be doing everything on the web now and in the future. Well I have to say… uh no. There are lots of people who haven’t embraced the web. Actually I would say a vast geographic portion of this country as well as many other countries.

The issue isn’t entirely Scoble’s, he just isn’t looking around. He lives in an area where High Speed connectivity is abundant. He probably has multiple choices and can’t visualize someone who can’t have it if they want it. Which is odd with all of his Montana posts. The majority of my family, including some folks living in Million+ dollar homes in Virginia do not have high speed available to them[1].

Until such a time that the entire world has access to high speed, it is very premature to say everyone is doing everything on the web.

Even folks that have highspeed (I have 6Mpbs down and 1Mbs up) don’t completely embrace the web. I use the web mostly for looking up reference material[2]. Most of my internet bandwidth is consumed with VPN (connectivity to/from work and customers), downloading ISO images from Microsoft  RedHat SUSE and FreeBSD, ftp (to from my websites I manage), mail feeds to my mail server, finally comes web pages and IM.

I have no intention of storing my files up on someone else’s server. I have no intention of running office apps across the web. I rarely if ever check out webcasts, podcasts, streaming this or that. I don’t do P2P downloads. 

Anyway, I hope MSFT killed WinFS because they realized they were throwing good money after bad on it, not because they think the future of computers is entirely on the web. If they think this and it is why they did this then we will see other issues that result from this decision and the overall thought will go down as one of the biggest mistakes Microsoft will make.  

 

    joe

 

[1] Imagine living in a million dollar plus home in a neatly tended and gardened subdivision filled with million dollar plus homes on one acre lots and when you want to go onto the internet you hear the whistling of a MODEM and you are hoping to get a 56k connection…  The best network connectivity you have to your neighbors is an unsecured wireless connection that is a shakey 1Mbs at best because of the distance.

[2] The sites I visit in order of number of visits. Google, MSDN, MSKB, MSDN Premium (MSFT Source Code)