Pretty good analysis of MSFT, Google and Facebook. In the 1990s Bill Gates shared his visions in 1990 and 1994 at COMDEX (information at your fingertips and "Cairo"). In the 2000s Longhorn, WinFS (failed because dotNet was too slow) and the great work of Microsoft Labs like Photosynth. MSFT was on its peak with Office 2010 and Win7. Though then they closed their Labs department. And Satya Nadella only tries to milks the custumer with SaaS versions of their former on-premises software, expensive license model changes and hostile privacy intrusive spying stuff on end consumer. MSFT is such a mean company.
WinFS failed not because .NET was too slow, but because no one, not even the people in charge of WinFS, could explain why the fuck anyone would want something like this. I also don't get what's so great about Photosynth. Last I checked it completely failed to take off anywhere.
I was an intern in the WinFS team in 2004 - seriously nobody knew what it actually was even inside the team.
The best I could say was that it was a way for lots of applications writing their own complex datastores (like outlook) to share an OS-level platform so that it could be exposed to other applications with a unified API. It was way more a developer tool than a user-facing feature, but that's not how it was marketed.
For the same reason we want "locate". Except it would be nice to be able to query on many more attributes. And without having the machine be unresponsive for a while every day, only to find that "updatedb" decided to churn the machine.
and that is the main problem of Microsoft Research.
MS should have full world mapped in 3D by now integrated into their mapping service and beating google street view in every way possible.
