Gadgetopia

Longhorn goes to pieces: WinFS is out of Longhorn. That’s gotta hurt. They’ve been talking about this as the centerpiece of the release.

Advanced search features that Gates has termed the “Holy Grail” of Longhorn, the next major version of Windows, won’t be fully in place until 2009, Bob Muglia, the senior vice president in charge of Windows server development, told CNET News.com.

The technology, called WinFS, is an add-on the Windows file system that Microsoft says will make it easier for users to find data such as documents, e-mail messages and multimedia files — no matter what their format — on local PCs and across the network.