stevenberlinjohnson.com: Apple’s Ten-Year-Old Breakthrough:
I think it’s pretty ironic that the most highly-touted feature in Tiger is one they’ve been trying to get into a shipping OS for almost ten years. Sometimes information society isn’t quite as fast as it’s rumored to be.
InfoWorld: A tale of two Cairos: November 21, 2003: By Jon Udell: Platforms:
Microsoft’s 2003 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) reminded some observers of the same event in 1993, when the hot topics were the Win32 APIs, a rough draft of Windows 95 code-named Chicago, and a preview of a futuristic object-file-system-based NT successor code-named Cairo. The hot topics this year were the WinFX managed APIs, a rough draft of a future version of NT code-named Longhorn, and … Cairo. Now called WinFS, this vision of metadata-enriched storage and query-driven retrieval was, and is, compelling.
Maybe these aren’t the same thing, though from a user perspective they seem to be terribly similar. A persistent query database, updated in real time against an everchanging universe of data vs a constantly indexed filestore that can be queried as desired seem to provide similar benefits to end users: a way to find stuff, no matter the format or file type or, with hooks into an external datastore (via the Google API?), the location. If memory serves, the BeOS had some kind of query repository: you could save queries and re-run them as needed, which was handy in a development environment. My experience predates anything like a real desktop experience in Be, though.
But the fact these two projects have been under development and/or partially deployed since before the Internet became ubiquitous suggests it’s pretty difficult to do. If they are designed to scratch the same itch, it might be telling to consider how one approach will just ship as part of the OS and run alongside or on top of the existing file system while the other may well replace the file system and, according to some detractors, require some licensed server technology to access that data. That vision — of .NET server access being a prerequisite to access chunks of data, formerly known as files — may not come to pass. But it’s worth keeping in the back of one’s mind.
Empowerment vs control: which do you prefer?