I am just beginning to get my head around what WinFS is hyped as being and what it actually may be, at least as delivered in its first version on Longhorn.
At the moment I am a bit sceptical about Scoble's hype/optimisim, Metadata without filling in forms? It's coming and find Dare Obesanjo's scepticism a tad more realistic, WinFS and Metacrap .
One question I haven't seen discussed yet is how a typical home user is going to back up the putative terabyte of data on their hard drive. Even if one makes pretty optimistic assumptions about how easy it will be to enter metadata into WinFS, there are going to be many, many hours invested in creating a personal WinFS store. If people are really going to use that to store "all" their personal information it better not get lost. Full and easy backup is going to be crucial.
And it better not get hacked. Hacking into WinFS would give a hacker more than enough information to convincingly carry out identity theft.
Posted by Andrew Watt at February 15, 2004 06:01 PM