Microsoft Murders Max

  • Thread starter progressive realization
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progressive realization

Last piece of longhorn killed. Now Vista is only XP with a new skin and
minor improvements...

http://neosmart.net/blog/archives/277

Well, it's official at any rate. Contrary to what you've heard, Windows
Vista will not be shipping with any of the original technologies, features,
capabilities, or subsystems originally promised. First it was the real
Aero - complete visual control over one's system. Amazing graphics, sidebars
that were a part of the Windows Core, Aero Diamond. Then it was NGSCB and
its amazing security features - not DRM, but total privacy control; your
privacy. Monad. Last we heard, it was WinFS, the king-pin feature that was
promised to change the way you think of data. And now the last one is gone:
Microsoft Max is dead.

Microsoft Max was a "virtual photo albums and distributing them online in a
peer-to-peer fashion." But it was more than just a sharing tool, it,
in-keeping with the original Longhorn "tradition" provided a different way
of looking at the data stored on your drive. Microsoft Max + WinFS would
have been a formidable duo, but alas, it was not to be. For example, "3D
Mantle View" (pictured above), treated albums as individual items. It
provide a way to visually "stack" these and photos on top and around each
other in ways that pertained to the way you actually used them -
visualization of information movement.


But its biggest potential was the P2P functionality. No, it wasn't KazAa,
but it wasn't meant to be. It's not for sharing photos of your family
vacation so much as it was for team collaboration, sharing of thoughts and
ideas conveyed by means of a simple photo. Oh yeah, that reminds us - Vista's
previously well-developed PC-to-PC collaborative synchronization work
protocol was also exorcised a couple of months ago. It seems Microsoft is
dedicated to not shipping Vista with anything that might be deemed useful.

Again, just like when WinFS was officially killed, it's not like we couldn't
see it coming. Microsoft Max hasn't been touched in almost a year (March 6,
2006 to be exact), and Vista obviously hit Beta 2, RC1, and "RC2" without
it - but that doesn't make it OK though. Yesterday Microsoft came forward
and announced a final and "no matter what" RTM date (not RTM build, but
actual Release-to-Manufacturer) of November 30th, 2006. Yesterday Microsoft
came forward and killed the last remaining member of the Longhorn
information-control vision. Coincidence? Probably not.

It doesn't matter why or how, and it doesn't matter when the actual decision
was made. What does matter is that Microsoft had a killer idea for a
media-centric collaboration platform, and they killed it. But this is a bit
different from WinFS & Co. Microsoft Max can be built as stand-alone
application, and it doesn't have to be Microsoft that does it. It was a
great idea, and Microsoft had first "dibs" so to speak, but that doesn't
mean that the idea has to die along with it.
 
S

Steve

Groove may offer what Max's P2P does, not sure what the cost will be for
just the file sharing aspect.

But... MAX was cool, but it didn't work on 64bit in the early days, not sure
if it ever did.

WinFS never worked on 64Bit, but WinFS was very good, to the end users, the
new search features off vista + stacks etc in explorer should mean, end
users don't miss WinFS.

But to an ISV, WinFS was a really great peace off technology, just store you
'stuff' in WinFS and any apps that needs 'stuff' like yours can share it.

Steve
 

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