New Windows Feature Dropped

Microsoft Corp. said one of the most anticipated features of its next Windows operating system, planned for a separate release next year, had been canceled.

Microsoft had planned to ship the WinFS file system shortly after Windows Vista, which is slated to reach stores in January. In a weblog entry Friday, Quentin Clark, an executive on the project, wrote that WinFS would not ship separately. Some of it will be rolled into a later product.

WinFS was considered by investors to be the crucial feature that would spur upgrades to Vista when Microsoft separated the technologies in 2004 to complete Vista by 2006. The cancellation is the latest change involving Vista, which is running more than two years late and requiring Microsoft to revamp parts of the product and drop some features.

“This was the major feature of Windows Vista,” said Joe Wilcox, an analyst at Jupiter Research. “It was part of the operating system and it was an opportunity for developers. Spreading it out into other things that might appear someday is not the same thing.”

Microsoft shares rose 4 cents to $22.86.

WinFS was designed to change the way certain types of data, including photos, e-mails and music, were categorized to simplify searches for related files stored in different programs. Some of that categorization is also possible using personal computer search programs from Microsoft and Google Inc., Wilcox said.

Some of the WinFS technology will be rolled into the next version of Microsoft’s SQL database server, code-named Katmai, Clark wrote in his posting.