1) On the Desktop Search Wars - 

December 13, 2004

I call it MSNFS

I find highly coincidental that on Friday Microsoft lets out that WinFS isn't coming for a loooong time and on Monday releases a MSN desktop search utility packing some of the capabilities promised in the new file system. Maybe I've been watching high-tech companies too long and so make relationships where they don't exist. Or--maybe not.

2) http://www.neurobashing.com/blog/archives/2004/12/13/enough_with_the_desktop_search_already.html - Something with which I concur. I think the Operating Systems are not yet mature enough. You just CANNOT rely on training people and providing verbose Help Manuals. It just doesn’t work. You CANNOT expect them to take 200$ classes on Office when they have already spent $600 buying the software (That’s if they have, if they haven’t then they anyway cannot afford to get training). The user interface needs major changes, major improvements. Something that is more interactive, responsive, with what the user is doing. Not like the clippie in Office, but something more helpful and less intrusive.

Some time ago, someone ( Scoble ?) reported how everyone at Microsoft pitched in, helping the grandmas unfuck their MyDoom-infected computers. You go, girl. If you guys - the big brains - were forced to do that day in and day out, you'd see just how little the average user cares about search.

My users, and I suspect users at large, have bigger problems:

Outlook gives them totally meaningless error messages, hopelessly verbose and filled with obnoxious hex strings they read to me, slowly and with great care, over the phone. What Outlook means to say is, "The SMTP server returned garbage, when it shouldn't have", or "Your antivirus program is preventing you from sending mail for no good reason", or "You have once again typed the wrong password, because caps lock in on, again, since you used it to compose the entire last message". They don't know what a location bar is. They're not sure whether they have Internet or Broadband. Their computer is slow lately; do they have a virus? FrontPage just stopped working, can you fix it? And so on, and so on. Somewhere in there, they complain that they just saved a file, and now, they can't find it.

3) http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/005411.html - LongHorn WinFS goes the Cairo way. Another failed attempt at improving the file system. The “search wars” have begun and Microsoft rushes in their MSN Toolbar Suite with DeskBar, pushing WinFS further away.

December 13, 2004

Yes, We're on the Road to Cairo

Microsoft promised big with WinFS, the biggest new feature planned for next-generation-Windows Longhorn. In August, Microsoft announced plans (see blog here ) to take WinFS out of Longhorn, but deliver the file system in beta form about the time the new OS shipped. The beta may still happen, according to the CNET News.com story, but WinFS won't be making it in Windows anytime soon, apparently.

Microsoft's bigger problem won't be the technology, but the public and customer relations fallout from WinFS, which the company highly touted as a new means of finding and using data. For customers, there is the trust issue. The trust factor is something competitors should jump to exploit. Microsoft typically announces new products long before their release, a tactic that can delay IT managers from considering competing products; Microsoft knows how to hype important, new features. WinFS and other Longhorn changes represent an opportunity for competitors to show customers that they shouldn't wait to see what Microsoft is going to do next. And there is precedent, too. Microsoft made similar data storage promises with Cairo, the now infamous 1990s Windows version that never shipped.

WinFS's sudden departure should thrill competitors selling enterprise products. SQL Server 2005, Windows Longhorn desktop and Longhorn Server formed a potentially deadly triad for pulling enterprise sales. Still, as I will explain in a forthcoming report, Microsoft has other means of pulling sales through its "Integrated Innovation" strategy. Competitors should prepare in 2005 for what's coming in 2006. The report will offer best practices for coping with and even exploiting weaknesses in Microsoft's 2005-06 product roadmap.

WinFS could have anchored Microsoft's plans to unify search across the desktop, network and the Internet. Further delay creates opportunity for competitors like Google to deliver workable products. It's now obvious that rather than provide placeholder desktop search capabilities until Longhorn shipped, MSN will be Microsoft's major provider on the Windows desktop. That's assuming people really need the capability. Colleague Eric Peterson and I chatted about desktop search on Friday. Neither of us is convinced any of the current approaches hit the real consumer need. I see that as making more meaningful disparate bits of information and complex content types, like digital photos, music or videos.

WinFS promised to hit that need, particularly in Microsoft public demonstrations of Longhorn's capabilities. Now the onus and opportunity will fall on Apple, which plans to release metadata search capabilities with Mac OS 10.4 (a.k.a. "Tiger") in 2005. Right now, metadata holds the best promise of delivering more meaningful search and making sense of all the digital content piling up on consumers' and Websites' hard drives. But there are no standards around metadata. Now is the time for vendors to rally around a standard. No standard is a big problem. Take for example online music stores like iTunes, MSN Music or Napster, which all tag metadata slightly differently. Digital cameras capture some metadata about pictures, but not necessarily the same way. Then there are consumers using photo software to create their own custom metadata tags when they import photos.

By the way, there being no metadata standard is another reason for Microsoft to delay Longhorn. WinFS would have used metadata as its major search mechanism. No standard would make searching more cumbersome, if not impossible to do good enough. Apple doesn't have the same problem. With Mac OS X, Apple ships the iLife digital media suite and it operatesthe major online digital download store. Apple can control metadata at point of creation and support the tagging in Tiger. Remember also that Apple is working off a smaller base of users than the Windows market. I don't foresee a problem for Apple to convince its developers to support a metadata standards for Macs, particularly if it might evolve into a standard that could be later used on Windows products.