Jon Udell: Office conference wrapup

Jon Udell: Office conference wrapup: "Attendee: Those of us who saw the webstore in Sharepoint 2001 thought, wow, that's sort of what Cairo was going to be. And now looking at WinFS, it has vague echoes of what webstore was going to be. Is SQL really the underlying storage that's going to be in Sharepoint in the future?
Gates: Yeah, what's happened is that there's this dream of unified storage, which is the world of files, mail, records, all these things coming together in a very rich store. That's a dream we've been investing in for a long long time. It's about taking a very advanced version of SQL that can deal with XML, and can deal with streams, and putting a very high-level data model -- you could almost call it an entity-relationship data model -- on top of SQL, so it can deal with all these things. And that's the path we're going down. WinFS is merely the client implementation of that strategy. And so what Sharepoint is going to sit on top of is a database engine, and WinFS is just a framework on top of this database engine, those are one and the same thing. It's the next big iteration of SQL that gives us all of those powers. It's perfectly symmetric -- client to server, WinFS to Sharepoint. It's not even clear that WinFS and Sharepoint are necessary because what you're going to see is they're exactly the same thing. Sharepoint just evolves up on the server, WinFS evolves down on the client."

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