WinFS on WinXP

Just caught this over at Channel9 -- a link to an article by Mary Jo Foley at microsoft-watch.com, quoting "Tom Rizzo, Microsoft's director of product management for SQL Server" saying "Microsoft is busily back-porting the WinFS file-system technology to Windows XP."

If this is true, it could bring about a lot of innovative software much quicker from the hobbyist community (and the off-hours pro community). When WinFS got pulled from the longhorn pillars, I too was worried it would never see the light of day, but perhaps this will result in a quicker adoption rate, by adding the growing XP user base.

It still begs the question of what Longhorn embodies now... besides the first use of Monad (which looks like it will work for Windows 2003, but released first for Longhorn).

Robert Scoble has said "Microsoft has basically gone back to the drawing board with Longhorn".  This has slowed much of the fervor from the development community as a whole, as (at least as far as I'm concerned), it is fairly painful to devote to a technology only to have it canned later on.  See MS "Chrome" / ChromeEffects (which was added years later to DirectX), which had purported to be on the verge of bringing about a new way of developing for the web.