It's funny how circumstances can change your perception of what's
possible. A few months ago, key Microsoft architects were telling me
that it would be impossible to decouple the Avalon presentation
subsystem from the Longhorn OS. Now they're huddling in conference
rooms trying to figure out how to do just that. It makes me wonder what
else might turn out to be possible after all.
…
Here's an interesting footnote to the WinFS news: According
to John Montgomery, director of product management for the developer
division at Microsoft, good old full-text search will play a larger
role in Longhorn. Empowering us to find and organize our stuff was,
after all, one of the major goals of the project. The early rhetoric
discounted full-text search in favor of the highly structured WinFS
approach and suggested it would be impossible to deliver the desired
benefits any other way. Now architects are huddling in conference rooms
trying to figure out how to do the impossible. Of course, Apple had
already previewed a similar strategy for the forthcoming Tiger version
of OS X. If Steve Jobs can demonstrate Spotlight in 2004 and if Apple
can ship it in 2005, Microsoft ought to be able to match that by 2006.
[Full story at InfoWorld.com]
In a session on corporate blogging at this year's Foo Camp,
intranet bloggers at Google and Microsoft were able to compare notes.
The conclusion wasn't shocking: internal content is indexed and made
available more aggressively at Google than at Microsoft. … [Jon's Radio]