Death of a thousand cuts

"It's just a flesh wound"

Was that the Black Knight of Monty Python's Holy Grail or the Microsoft Vista product manager?

Microsoft is now cutting WinFS from Vista.. I particularly liked Gartner's take on its demise:

"WinFS has long been a solution in search of a problem," David Smith, analyst for Gartner Inc., said Monday. "Vista beta has reasonably robust search. It's good enough, which is what people were looking for."

"Good enough" - such inspirational words. Worthy of the Black Knight, perhaps.

Another appendage chopped off was Monad, Microsoft's Unixy shell (it's not really Unixy at all, but because it uses at that awful character based command line, it attracted that modifier). Monad was cut because of security concerns.

I guess they dodged that bullet, but if Monad is so dangerous, can anyone tell me why it's apparently still going to be in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007? Let's see, is an Exchange Server apt to be a target? No, of course not! Great, let's put something we know is dangerous in it.

Some of the early security stuff has been chopped too, though most of that really had nothing to do with YOUR security, but rather was designed to keep you from stealing content. There have been more cuts: Secure ID, PC to PC Sync, EFI - but I'm sure that the Black Knight's chipper words apply:

"'Tis but a scratch."

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